MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
"People of colour" is woke-stupid rather than TDS. The two ailments* are frequently co-morbid, but conceptually different. The Bulwark crowd have TDS but are not woke-stupid. The leadership of corporate America went woke-stupid around 2020 (but are now recovering) but not TDS.
* Modulo the argument that Trump is as bad as he claims to be and TDS not an ailment, rather trusting your lying eyes over all the people acting like "this is fine" dogs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I'm pretty sure that if an Israeli Arab marries a non-Israeli from the United States, they can live with their spouse in Israel, same thing with an Israeli Jew. I'm pretty sure there is an exception if the proposed marriage partner is a non-Israeli from Gaza or J & S, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure that this exception applies to both Jews and Arabs alike. Do you disagree?
Jim Crow laws were facially neutral too. It didn't stop them being racist.
The same is true of the national quotas in the 1924 Immigration Act in the US, or the "patriality" rules in the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts in the UK, if you think it is possible for an immigration law to be racist in the morally relevant sense.
It is very easy for a competent politician to write facially neutral laws targetting a specific ethnic group, particularly if they are okay with modest collateral damage (as the Jim Crow South definitely was - I'm less sure about the other examples).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
You can make a reasonable case that this is already de facto the law in most of the US (and the UK, and presumably most of western Europe) because of the way police and courts enforce facially gender-netural laws. If cops and judges who deal with domestic violence are exclusively trained in the feminist Duluth Model then the law as enforced will reflect that.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Which is arguably a bad thing, but empirically isn't causing falling marriage rates.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
It's complete bullshit. For one, it's not even happening now, when mate choice is a thing, but more importantly, mate choice being "a thing" is completely novel; historically, marriages were decided by the families of the prospective spouses, not the spouses themselves, and this is true across cultures and time, as far as we're able to find in the record.
Not in cisHajnal cultures. Westerners were choosing their own spouses by about 1000AD for the peasant class and 1400AD for the middle class.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Anyway, we could compare to other times in history where there was a growing population and consider sexual norms then. Population growth was very high in colonial era North America (higher than the 1960s) but sexual norms were very restrictive back then. The Gaza strip had fairly high population growth more recently but it's not exactly a paradise of free love. There are many counterexamples.
Everything I have read about colonial era North America implies that the shotgun marriage rate was noticeably higher than the old country, with the New England Puritans the worst culprits. Which is exactly what you would expect if there was a sexual loosening but no official toleration.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The basic logic of a religious-right coalition built around Likud is going to survive Netanyahu as long as the religious Zionist parties are willing to work with the Haredim.
Although I agree with you that if Netanyahu was eaten by a landshark tomorrow, we would see the rapid formation of an all-Zionist "unity" coalition (i.e. no Arabs, left or Haredi) with his successor as Likud leader becoming PM (possibly with an agreement to rotate with Eisenkot), and most Jewish Israelis would breathe a sigh of relief. There are 80 MKs to work with and you need 61, so I suspect the incoming PM is looking to cut rather than recruit partners.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The problem with this argument is that we aren't seeing the now-scarce Zoomettes getting what they want.
The problem with the dating market in 2026 is that it does not clear, not that it is clearing at a price that young men don't like. Both sexes think it sucks, and there are people of both sexes who want to match with MMV peers and are unable to. Most people of both sexes still want marriage, but marriage rates are low and falling. This is a disaster, not a shift in power in the battle of the sexes.
The normie view on what is wrong seems fairly clear - that the main socially acceptable way of meeting strangers as potential dates (subscription-funded dating apps) does not work.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The same is true in banks - including the high-end back office roles like quant risk modellers or regulatory specialists. In-house legal and the good Finance roles are whiter - probably because they mostly recruit women who mummy-tracked out of BigLaw and Big 4 accountancy firms respectively.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Haredi parties got 13 seats out of 120, down from 18 four years ago. Israeli media suggests that this is about Shas (the Sephardic Haredi party, but also the only party specifically dedicated to protecting Sephardi and Mizrahi interests) losing non-Haredi Sephardim to Likud as the war in Gaza makes the Haredi draft-dodging issue more salient. Religious Zionist parties also got 13 (down 1, possibly because a joint list broke up) - the vast majority of religious Zionist in Israel are Modern Orthodox in their faith, and the vast majority of Modern Orthodox Jews are religious Zionist in their politics. In addition, a lot of religious Zionists voted for Likud, and some for Together - a right-liberal joint list combining Naftali Bennet's otherwise right-liberal religious Zionist party and Yair Lapid's secular right-liberal party.
In terms of long-term trends, MO Jews also have high birth rates (though not quite as high as Haredim) and are also benefitting from religious-Zionism motivated immigration of (mostly MO) diaspora Jews. The MO/RZ bloc is therefore growing about as fast as the Haredi bloc. The question is whether the MO/RZ bloc remains allied with the Haredim against secular Jews (which is what Netanyahu has built his career on), or whether they ally with the secular right to strengthen Israel by eliminating Haredi parasitism (which is what Bennet wants). If the Netanyahu coalition holds together, then I expect the most economically productive secular Ashkenazim to feel increasingly unwelcome until they start moving to America, while the Haredim eat Israel from the inside.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Musk may not be anti-semitic personally, but I wouldn't want to have to convince a sceptical Jew given the way he signal-boosts anti-semitic memes on X.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Nor are communists, but riling up the base by nutpicking the worst communists is a standard part of doing right-wing politics, and it works.
Multiple official US government social media accounts are under the control of Groyper staffers, and that situation will only get worse as long as MAGA remains in power and twenty-something MAGA supporters become more Groyperish by cohort replacement.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I don't think you need to posit anything about the author's views on transgenderism to understand how an author would be upset by fanfic writers gender-swapping a character they cared about. Most fanfic writers avoid fanfic of their own works because they don't like what fanfic writers do to their characters.
As a separate issue, given the grey legal status of fanfic, any US administration other than Trump II would not poast about fanfics from official government accounts, and the same is true of any large for-profit business. I remember the headslapping that went on when one of my colleagues tried to incorporate a meme based on a TV or movie screenshot into in-house training materials. It's copyright, you clown. You can't do that in the office.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Wizard-muggle pairs are almost always magical in their offspring.
Do we actually see any? Pureblood-muggleborn pairs are always magical in their offspring on screen. (Do they have a higher risk of squib children? Unclear given how rare squibs are generally.) But both parents are wizards in those cases. But wizarding and muggle society are sufficiently separate that I don't see how a wizard-muggle pair would work. We definitely don't see non-squib muggles living as associates of wizards in wizard places like Hogwarts or Hogsmeade, and a wizard living with a muggle partner in the muggle world would have a hard time complying with the secrecy laws.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Isn't it just "Boy from non-aristocratic background gets to marry a princess after slaying the dragon"? That is one of the oldest ones in the book.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Printers are retards.
Benjamin Franklin disagrees with you.
That said, pre-automation a printshop employed a lot of people whose only job was setting type and for which the IQ floor was "able to read" - although the acceptable error rate was low enough that the IQ-plus-conscientiousness floor was quite high.
The Darwin Awards were set up to collect darkly amusing stories about people who inadvertently improve the genetic fitness of the population by selecting themselves out of the gene pool through acts of catastrophic stupidity.
The vast majority of Darwin Awards are caused by testosterone poisoning plus self-estimated IQ exceeding actual IQ, not by objectively low actual IQ. If the D&D abilitystat model described the world, then Darwin Award winners would be improving collective WIS, not INT.
By contrast, evil geniuses are man-bites-dog stories:
I don't think smart sociopaths and sadists are particularly rare. The supply of smart people wanting to enter careers where sociopathy is an advantage (politicians, lawyers, financiers etc.) exceeds the demand. I do think smart sociopaths and sadists engaging in blatant sociopathy and sadism in the style of e.g. Bond villains is rare because it is a strategy that doesn't pay given that we have non-zero amounts of rule of law.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Yes - sociopaths and sadists are different in important ways. It isn't immediately obvious which is worse morally, although I am reasonably confident that sociopaths do more damage in total because the system is better at detecting and rejecting sadists.
One of the Hard Problems of running a civilised society is how to work around the problem that careers which allow you to impose justified punishment (including but not limited to cops) will preferentially attract sadists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Unfortunately for the mainstream, the fruits of Mormonism are vastly superior to any sect of Trintarian Christianity. My interest in Mormonism arose when I felt the angel Moroni speaking to me through my butt as I crossed the Utah state line on I-15 and was confirmed by the pleasant, hard-working and just basically functional people I met across the state.
[I, personally, can't be a Mormon or a Trinitarian Christian because I have a spergy need to believe true things. Calvin would no doubt say that the Lord created me fit for the Fire]
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Given the labour laws, it would be very surprising if finding entry-level jobs quickly was easier in Europe than the US. I suspect that the big difference is that the quality of life as a market-rate tenant in a cheap neighborhood of a European city is a lot higher than the US equivalent because there is less violent crime and you don't have to deal with the problems of running a beater car.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
My theory: some portion of people are born with a tendency towards suicide, and this will first express itself through engaging in activities likely to get oneself killed while ignoring safety precautions before manifesting as a formal suicide if the accident doesn't occur. Suicidal ideation and unsafe driving habits are highly correlated among teenagers.
I have been to multiple funerals of this type. There was
- The shy nerdy boy who went over a cliff while jogging in good weather
- The boy who had just come out to unsympathetic parents who "fell" onto the tube tracks while drunk
- The hotshot electrical engineer with clinical depression who electrocuted himself
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Fair enough, but it is the case that red America now has ubiquitious handgun ownership, and back in the day the gun at home was more likely to be a hunting rifle.
Suicide by long gun is a Russian political joke, not a practical problem.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The decision to aggressively enforce the laws against child neglect, including in marginal cases, was not partisan. In the UK, it was driven by demands for "never again" following sensationalist media courage of a small number of serious cases ending with a dead child. I suspect the US was the same.
If you believe that someone is to blame every time a kid is hurt, then the person to blame in this case is indeed the "neglectful" mother. I was a small boy and am the father of two of them, so I am perfectly aware that the optimal rate of self-inflicted injuries among small boys is greater than zero.
I still think this was Republicans' fault, but only because Florida is red enough that any misgovernment in Florida is presumptively Republicans' fault.
That the children are sent to a suspected abuser is at worst government incompetence.
That this type of "suspected abuser" should be denied access to kids (even when it solves a problem for the authorities) is a feminist motte-and-bailey. He was accused of slapping his (ex? - the press coverage is confusing)-wife, not of harming a child.
If we didn't live in a society which believed that a man who slaps his wife once should lose contact with their kids for life, then there wouldn't have been an issue in the first place because there was a functioning parent in town who could look after the kids, at least when he wasn't at work.
Dated. Past tense.
"Through friends" (which doesn't just mean dating your friends, it also means dating friends-of-friends you met at house parties, using friends as matchmakers etc.) was the plurality answer to "how did you meet your partner" from about 1950 to about 2010. In the current year, more than 60% of couples met online.
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