Harlequin5942
No bio...
User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Given that males and females both tend to prefer submissive to dominant roles in fantasy (if I recall the surveys correctly) the intended audience for that sort of thing might generally be generic women consumers of porn, rather than you.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Not a normie job, but Sylvester Stallone's career went ok:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Party_at_Kitty_and_Stud%27s
An interesting parallel with the Russian Revolution, which started out being sexually liberatory, until it was decided that sexuality outside of marriage was "uncommunist" and "bourgeois decadence" (for the non-nomenklatura).
As Orwell discusses in Nineteen-Eighty Four, there is a tension between totalising ideologies and sex, because if you're thinking about the latter, you're not thinking about the revolution, and it forms loyalties that are transient, chaotic, personal, and potentially conflicting with loyalty to the ideology's preferred authority. And Dionysus unleashed really IS dangerous.
I think another factor is Mrs. Grundy. When Christian conservativism is the norm (at least when she is growing up) her prudishness will take a Christian conservative form. However, when progressive liberalism is the norm, it will take a progressive liberal form. I remember noticing this with the Feminist Society at university 15 years ago, who literally dressed like puritans (modest all-black clothing) and would almost literally march on stage to give their pre-agreed speeches at student meetings, like a set of militant evangelicals, to explain why "Pimp My ..." marketing or "Lads' Mags" should be banned from campus.
See e.g. the Friends episode where Phoebe discovers that her twin sister is a porn star. This is played for laughs, with the only shame being (some) men's enjoyment of porn and implicit inability to get the real thing. The idea of this being truly scandalous would be about as out of place in the Friendsverse as a serious episode about fighting communist infiltration or one of the women being kidnapped by cruel Native Redskins.
Depends by whom and how you define the porn industry. Playboy was mainstreamed through the 1970s. The 1980s saw somewhat of a reaction due to AIDS and the Traci Lords scandal that revealed that some (many?) pornstars were underage. Val Venis was a wrestler on children's TV, with a pornstar gimmick, in the 1990s. By the 2000s, Jenna Jameson was a celebrity who could be at a Holywood party without people particularly noticing. Nudity and simulated sex has long been common in Holywood films, with fairly artificial distinctions from "real" sex, and even then, softcore "porn" indicates that the difference was supposed to be a blurry line of genre/artistic merit. Wild Things circa 1950 would be regarded as a pornographic film, albeit one with high production values, yet it was a mainstream movie in the 1990s.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
I think a lot of people on the left have a power model of sexual agency (and agency in general, e.g. low wage work) which is extremely dangerous, because there's no way to translate a power model into a predictable legal system, in the same way that e.g. a classical liberal or (Abrahamic) religious conservative model can be predictable. Classical liberalism: people have freedom and responsibility, outside of some explicitly demarcated boundaries. Abrahamic religions provide a textual basis for law that can be either consulted directly by the literate, or at least (in a functioning Abrahamic society) there is probably a set group of widely respected interpreters (priests, ministers, imams, rabbis etc.) whose advice is a reliable guide to what is acceptable behaviour, even if you (or they) don't know the whole system of laws.
In turn, this inherent unpredictability of power models of agency transfers huge power onto those social forces with the authority to determine what power relations make interactions "exploitative" or "not real choices", as well as who gets victim status and its perks. A cheap but clear example of this chaotic authoritarianism is given by the handling by the MeToo movement of sexual assault accusations against Brett Kavanaugh vs. those against Joe Biden: there was no predictable and explicit principle, so what you end up with is trial-by-media of a partisan and special-pleading sort.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Yes, it's a strange yet common view, where women are both inert objects AND people whose autonomous choices regarding abortion, adultery, prostitution etc. are sacred.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
I knew someone who embodied this confusion, from a very generic middle-class Western background. She was very excited to do "Slut Walks", but she was worried that they were being appropriated by "actually slutty women" i.e. strippers, prostitutes, pornstars etc., and she's opposed to the sex industry in all its forms. Her ethos was basically that sex workers should never be judged negatively (at least if women or gay) but also that their industries should be abolished.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Do you really think every guy in this 63% is an unreasonable neurotic mess?
No, but I also I don't think every guy in the 63% is willing to get laid with any woman. If anything, you have to be a neurotic mess to want to sleep with ANY woman.
I'm not saying that young men have it easy in dating (quite the opposite) but that's not because it's impossible for them to get laid (with women - obviously it's easy for them to find some man willing to pound their ass) but rather it's because dating is a matching problem where relatively few people want to match with young men, especially the neurotic ones - which is a high proportion of young men.
In my experience, this strongly reverses once you go under a certain age (an age at which most people period would have been married not too long ago).
At that age, I would imagine we are talking about lizardman constants for both men and women, in terms of their desire to marry?
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
The problem is that when female hypergamy is left totally unchecked (as it is now), the standards become so high that you can't meet them simply by being a hard-working guy with reasonable achievements. And even if you can, that takes time. Meanwhile the alleged prize waiting for you at the end of the tunnel already has a bodycount of 20 with guys who were born with a better jawbone or a few more inches of height. Not worth it.
It's really not that hard for men to get laid in the modern world, even if you're not good looking, and women tend to be more interested in getting married than men. Most ugly guys I know as friends have long-term girlfriends, but these are the types of guys I'd be interested in having as friends, whereas there are plenty of non-ugly guys I wouldn't be interested in having as friends and who don't (I don't say can't) get laid, largely it seems because of their neuroticism.
However, I agree that earlier marriage (at least involving men who grow up quickly - get a good job, a good trade, and have a reputation as a moral law-abiding god-fearing citizen) would be good. Promiscuity should be a reward of status for successful, artistic, or high-born men, like the old days.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Can't think of any other reason so many cities have adopted policies of "decriminalizing" theft and lesser assaults.
Welfare state + ageing population -> reduced resources for anything else, including law & order and defence (ironically, what a classical liberal would regard as close to the entire purposes of the state).
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Men are fair (at least as regards this subject of evaluating the distribution of characteristics). Women are equivalently not.
In the sense of "fair" as a uniform probability distribution, I agree. And I think this creates enough social problems / advantages to think about. On the problem side, men often have a feeling of being valued only for what they do and provide in romance, which can create the feeling of being exploited. (The male counterpart of objectification, perhaps.) On the advantageous side, for most men, they must achieve something to be regarded as attractive; moreover, the more they achieve, the more opportunities they have; for mentally healthy men at least, this can serve as a motivation.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
My point is simply that it's mathematically coherent, though I'd add that when preferences are involved (such as sexual attractiveness) then human traits are often more Pareto distributed, e.g. wealth, income, popular success of people in creative fields, cities vs. towns, and movie profits. There are also human traits, such as incurring healthcare costs, which are not normally distributed.
Ratings of sexual attractiveness ARE "amorphous feelings", so the main challenge of justifying their existence would be to evince their existence. I suppose it's possible that women understate their ratings of men's appearances, e.g. to avoid seeming slutty.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
many if not most women are statistically illiterate (or at least in this particular area) and thus consider 80% of men to be below average and therefore unworthy of the baseline of respect and consideration
If "average" means something like the arithmetic mean, then this is totally possible.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
But surprisingly enough, there are Hindus who consume beef. More commonly in Southern India.
I didn't know that. Goes to show that there are no true universal generalisations about Hindus, including this one.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
not have any particular beef with others
To be fair, the Hindus don't have a beef with anyone else, or even others, or even alone.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Do Trump and the Trumpists back down from China in this case? I was under the impression that they tended to be anti-China and at least anti-anti-Russian, but the anti-Chinese sentiment was more in 2015-2020. I don't hear so much of it from them any more, but that might be because anti-Chinese sentiment is now commonplace among Democrats, including Biden, whereas e.g. Obama and Hillary seemed to be more the reverse of Trump regarding China and Russia.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
I will take that as a compliment. Sachs, unlike me, is, uh, accomplished. He is not talking his ass off like all of us here, even if he's talking his ass off. At least, I think.
Unlike all of us here, he is also a relentless China shill, and concomitantly reflexively gives the official Chinese line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs#China_2
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
It depends: Douglas Murray was a neo-con back in the Noughties. I would need to see stats before I took a view on whether e.g. gay men are more anti-Islam or anti-immigration than they were back at that time.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Yes, I live in a generic left wing European city, but a few miles outside are villages where politics tends to vary from the Christian Democrats to the far right.
Some places like Poland are different, in that rural areas tend to be both more right wing and poorer, which is reflected in how Polish politics is divided more on social than economic grounds.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
If you view AfD as a bulwark against Islamic immigration and Islamic immigrants as a major threat to gay people, then this is quite rational. This is also the reasoning behind Dawkinite atheists who, now that fundamentalist Christianity has receded as a threat to all but the most paranoid atheist, have turned their attentions to fundamentalist Islam.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Now, whether they will be competent remains to be seen.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Even Incitatus made some good calls, when the right answer was "Nay."
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Excellent summary.
Back then, he still had a tendency towards drama and hyping Russian progress, but the war was more dramatic and Russian progress was more worth hyping, so he was still very much worth watching. Sure, his forecasts of Russian advances were almost always wrong (for those of us who grew up reading about the Great Patriotic War, this war is amazingly static) but they provided a rare insight into pro-Russian expectations. Every time I look at his video titles now, it feels a little embarassing.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
I think the parallels are better:
(1) The more powerful and invading force is Russia/the USSR in both cases. Putin's view of the world was formed in the latter days of the USSR, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The US intervention in Vietnam was led by a very different generation of leaders from the US today, with an overarching view of the world (early Cold War anticommunism) that has no applicability in the Russia-Ukraine war.
(2) Afghanistan did not have a clear political, cultural, and geographic division akin to Vietnam, with a narrow border between them. The same is true of the parts of Ukraine that the Russians have been invading since 2022, though not the parts where they intervened in 2014-2022.
(3) North Vietnam is not analogous with Russia, obviously. The US is not going to start bombing missions over Moscow because of Ukraine. The same was true in the Soviet-Afghan War: the US was never going to attack the Soviet Union because of Afghanistan, let alone a land intervention analogous to North Vietnam.
(4) As with the Afghan War, Russia has local allies that have popularity and legitimacy over a certain area (the Donbas + Crimea / Kabul) but lack an insurgency over the area of their enemy. In contrast, the Viet Cong provided both a powerful insurgency in South Vietnam AND a useful device to prevent escalation ("We North Vietnamese aren't invading you, oh no, so it would be escalation for you to invade us!").
(5) In Afghanistan, the US was in a position of funding people fighting its major enemy. In the Vietnam War, in the early phases, the US was funding the South Vietnam government against an insurgency supported by the North Vietnamese supported by the Soviets. So the link between US actions and frustrating Soviet interests was much stronger in the case of Afghanistan. It is obvious that the Russia-Ukraine War is more similar to the Soviet-Afghan War in this important respect.
(6) In Afghanistan, the US had extremely useful support from Pakistan, while Iran was neutral and successful in remaining neutral. In the Vietnam War, Cambodia was theoretically neutral but unable to be useful for the US, for a variety of reasons. South Vietnam had to worry about both its border with North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with no adjacent land allies. In the Russia-Ukraine War, the US has a chain of adjacent allies from Romania/Hungary/Poland/Slovakia/Poland to the Atlantic.
(7) In Western opinion, the South Vietnamese were a colonial remnant. The North Vietnamese were commies, but they were anti-colonial commies, and as anti-communism faded, support for the Vietnam War faded. In the Soviet-Afghan War, this was reversed. In Western opinion, the Russia-Ukraine War is seen as closer to the Soviet-Afghan War. You might disagree, but I'm talking about opinion, not truth.
(8) The Ukrainians were expected to do much worse than they have, just like the Soviets were expected to swallow up Afghanistan - maybe even make it an SSR. I don't know of any parallel with the Vietnam War, where the best case scenario for the US was always a frozen conflict akin to Korea.
The most important points here are (3-5). The US is not going to attack Russia over Ukraine, it is in a position of hurting Russia across multiple dimensions of power without losing a single US soldier, and there is no parallel to the Viet Cong insurgency.
The most important disanalogy is that the Russia-Ukraine War is not a guerilla conflict. However, this is a disanalogy with both the Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. Instead, we have a position were Russia - due to a mix of lack of public support, economic weakness, and military incompetence - is making slow progress at best against a conventional enemy.
Not that I'm not predicting the outcome, except that whatever happens it will be far less costly to US power and prestige than the Vietnam War.
9/11 was Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban.
The Taliban fought the US after (a) the US demanded that Bin Laden etc. were handed over and (b) the US joined with the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban. If the Taliban had demanded the extradition of Pinochet (if he had been in hiding in the US) and allied with China to invade the US, I imagine that Americans would also have turned on the Taliban - not that the US was ever actually allied with or directly helping the Taliban, but I'm sure your suggestion to the contrary was just terse writing.
More options
Context Copy link