QuinoaHawkDude
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User ID: 1789
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
While the orgasm gap definitely goes a long way to explaining why women are less radically DTF than men, I think that male sexual desire is also more complicated than "I am having sex and sex is awesome." Yassine put it well in the latest Bailey podcast when he said that the straight male desire for sex is mostly about status. Men want to have sex with the most physically attractive woman they can find willing to have sex with them, because of the status/ego boost. "She's so hot, she could bang literally any guy she wants, and she chose to bang ME!" This explains the disconnect in some of the other discussions in this thread around "incels should stop complaining about how hard it is to get laid, it's really not that hard, all you have to do is X" where X is a list of things like going to bars all the time, learning how to chat up women, learn how to dress better, etc. And at that point it starts to sound like a lot of work. And if you have to put a lot of work into getting laid, suddenly it's not such a status boost, is it? Now she's not banging me because she chose me out of all these other guys, she's banging me because I was the only guy who was willing to flatter her for long enough.
There's certainly an equivalent for straight women but it's the commitment after the sex that is important, not the sex itself. "He's so smart and successful, he could choose to commit to any chick he wants, and he's committing to me!" And I think "can't afford to be that profligate with their scarce reproductive resources" translates to "can't afford to hoe around too much or it will be impossible to get any high-status male to commit to me" in modern times.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I saw somebody claim that in $CURRENT_YEAR what most people mean by "that's unconstitutional!" isn't "I've read the US Constitution and it's amendments and found this specific text which clearly prohibits it". What they mean is "I feel so strongly that this is wrong that I don't want to have to argue with anybody about it anymore". Saying that something isn't political because it's a human right is pretty much the same.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Fast forward through satanism, open findom relationships, antifa friends, trans rights and racist jokes, if you care about 'ethical consumerism' like is clearly done by Karl and friends, why should any right of center person support or tolerate someone like Karl?
Do you ever get upset when progressives refuse to tolerate somebody because they expressed right-of-center views that aren't central to what that person is primarily known for? Do you ever feel like, you know, it's kind of unfair for somebody who's really good at something like acting or writing or programming or making cool YouTube videos to suddenly have no platform to do those things because they said something completely unrelated to any of those things that progressives happened to disagree with? If so, then why would you think it's okay to do that when the shoe is on the other foot?
FWIW, I have enjoyed owning, shooting and maintaining guns for years, but I find it increasingly hard to enjoy the hobby as somebody who's culturally blue tribe because of exactly the attitude you just expressed, and the fear that in order to be a "gun guy" you also have to hate non-whites and LGBTQ people or you won't fit in.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
From the stolen-election perspective, the end goal (thus the bailey) is "the election results do not represent a fair vote or a small-d democratic mandate."
If that's the bailey for "stolen elections" then every US presidental election ever has been stolen due to the electoral college.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It's interesting that you've framed this as a comparison between "progressives" (a political belief system) and "Republicans" (a political party and its supporters). In that case, you could argue that "Republicans" are just the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to progressivism for one reason or another. But if you'd said "Democrats" instead of "progressives" you could just as easily say "Democrats are the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to conservatism". Lots of people vote Republican because they really don't like some key progressive policy and have nowhere else to go in the USA's two-party system, and vice versa, as opposed to enthusiastically supporting the whole party platform.
Occasionally somebody will say something like "In politics, at some point you have to go beyond just opposing things you don't agree with. You have to actually be for something." This is harder for conservatives from a political standpoint because in many cases, the solutions they favor for problems (when they agree with progressives on what things are problems) are more personal, private and local, and so there's no alternative government solution to propose.
Here's a Patton Oswalt stand-up bit from 2011 (NSFW!) where he talks about being asked to audition for the role of "Gay best friend" in a romcom and him saying that he would only do it if he was allowed to play the character as really, really dumb, because he was tired of seeing all gay characters in media being portrayed as impossibly awesome and flawless.
The flip side of this is Weak Men are Superweapons. I've definitely started noticing recently that, at least in the media I consume, fundamentalist Christians (or deeply religious people in general) are never depicted as anything other than evil. Examples: the "Crackstone" character in Wednesday, the antagonists in Devil in Ohio (well, those were actually Satanists, but they sure looked like a standin for Puritans or Amish people). Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
To perhaps offer a steelman, there are certain cultural practices and norms tied to gender that are essentially arbitrary in the modern environment. There's no inherent reason that women should be forced to shave their legs/armpits to be considered attractive, for instance, or that men shouldn't do the same. There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute.
Absolutely.
That still doesn't imply that I should be forced to affirm that somebody with a penis is a woman just because they don't like traditionally masculine behaviors or prefer traditionally feminine behaviors.
This feels like beating a dead horse at this point, but it really all boils down to what information people expect the words "man/male/he/him/his" and "woman/female/she/her/hers" to convey. I want "woman" to mean "a biologically female human being with two X chromosomes and a vajayjay", and "man" to mean "a biologically male human being with XY chromosomes and a dong". Hermaphrodites and people with oddball chromosome configurations are so rare that our language doesn't need to account for them, and as far as I can tell they're not the ones at the forefront of the campaign to redefine those word clusters.
I have no problem if a man wants to wear clothing that is traditionally feminine and prefer knitting to video games as a hobby, or vice versa. Men who have more feminine interests and expressions and women with more masculine interests and expressions have always existed. Like, I see what you're doing there, girl with short hair and baggy clothes. You're de-emphasizing your femininity for whatever reason. I can still tell you're a girl. You're not fooling anybody. You also don't need to put "enby/they/them" in your Twitter bio or change your name to a gender-neutral or male one for me to figure out what your deal is. You can dress and groom yourself however you like, and nobody should harass you for it, and they should treat you the same as they treat anybody else in public-sphere interactions (teacher-student, employer-employee, customer-server, etc.). None of that means that you're not female.
Now, I feel like I have to acknowledge that there are definitely cultures, both past and present, that are much less tolerant of "deviant" behavior along these lines. Parents yelling at their boys for playing with dolls instead of army men, and vice versa. I feel like that is just a specific case of intolerance for misfits, which I believe is wrong and should be prevented. But the solution to "men who like to knit get made fun of" isn't "okay, then change your name to a female name and start insisting that the world treat you like an actual woman".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
If we're going to start counting "media conspires to suppress stories harmful to their favored candidates during an election cycle" as "stolen elections" then every major election since the invention of democracy has probably been stolen.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I remember listening to an econ podcast (I want to say either Freakonomics or Planet Money) that was exploring some things about how restaurant menus and pricing work, probably centered around how they work in the US. The big question was "what's up with free bread or chips and salsa? Why are restaurants giving away free product that just fills you up and keeps you from spending more money?" The answer was "so you don't order dessert". What restaurants (particularly large American restaurant chains) want is to turn tables over as fast as possible. They really don't want you spending two hours at a table ordering an appetizer and an entree and a dessert (which is kind of a stark contrast with my personal experience of dining in the UK, where restaurant table reservations are for fixed time spans, usually 90 minutes, and they seem to get offended if each person doesn't order three courses). Most restaurants really can't make desserts profitable, they can't sell them for what it costs to make them and keep them around, plus you're occupying the table that could instead by used by people who are going to order a main course that they can charge 3-4 times as much for but ultimately probably costs the same to make and serve. However, most sit-down restaurants feel like they have to have desserts on the menu because it's just expected of them. They just don't feel any real incentive to make them spectacular.
A few other things that could be at play, just off the top of my head:
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Sugar and fat could just be so great at being superstimuli that you don't really need to make them all that great to satisfy most people.
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Regarding the lack of variety, I can at least personally attest that on the rare occasions that I do decide to order dessert at a restaurant, I want to make sure I'm going to actually like it, so I'm less likely to go for something I don't recognize.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It feels like a while since the term "reality-based community" was in vogue, but I remember wondering how support for trans rights could possibly fit well with that back when I first saw progressives using it, without realizing it was just a shorthand for "we believe in The Cathedral, not The Church".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
As one of Freddie's subscribers and occasional commenters, prior to his "talking about trans people in the comments of one of my posts about an unrelated subject = instant ban" policy, it really was common for at least one comment thread on all of his posts to end up centering on trans issues, no matter how unrelated the post's subject matter. It was annoying.
I believe that this community experimented with a ban on the HBD topic for a while for similar reasons, and I don't think it was because the mods were anti-HBD per se, they were just tired of it being the only goddamn thing we talked about. That's my memory, anyway.
About the least charitable take I have on Freddie's banning commenting on about trans issues is that he may realize just how badly the social justice left has shot itself in the foot in the last five years with the trans issue, and is tired of having people using it as a generic gotcha attack on social justice politics in general.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Money (as in "a countable medium of economic exchange") is great and pretty foundational to human civilization, but it does tend to distort people's thinking once the scale of the numbers, and thus the corresponding impact on the real world allocation and distribution of scarce resources, gets several orders of magnitude beyond what they're used to thinking about in their daily lives.
Like, it's clear that if a man is spending $1000 a month on booze and gambling while his kids are starving, he is being evil. He could very easily spend $1000/mo on food for his kids instead of on his own enjoyment. $1000 of food per month is a tiny fraction of your local food economy.
It's less clear to me that Bezos could end world hunger overnight by putting his billions of dollars towards that goal instead of building rockets. What real-world resources are the two different projects competing over? Food production is mostly about arable land and physical labor; rockets use very little of the former and relatively modest amounts of the latter. The main resource that space project money goes towards is smart and skilled people's time and creativity. Whether you think world hunger could be solved by Bezos would seem to hinge on whether or not you think that if all those smart rocket scientists were put to work figuring out how to grow more food (or, realistically, how to distribute it better - I've never heard anybody gainsay the conventional wisdom that the world grows enough food to feed everybody, it just doesn't get it into everybody's hands efficiently enough before it spoils) it would make a sustainable impact.
There's also a separate issue of the difference between a one-time investment in developing a technology that you expect to eventually turn a profit (as far as I know, SpaceX, Blue Origin and all the other private space companies definitely expect to get their money back down the line once their rockets are developed) versus sustaining a charitable non-profit (if "solving world hunger" simply means "give money to everybody who can't afford to feed themselves, from now until eternity if necessary") which has no financial upside (except perhaps in a macro sense, i.e. people who aren't starving will be more productive and the economy as a whole benefits, but that's the government's job, not Bezos's). Leftists would still claim it's the right thing to do with that money, but approximately none of them have built billion-dollar businesses by spending their money on things that will eventually make more money, etc., so they really have no clue what it takes to get those resources in the first place.
And let's not forget just how effective poor people are at ruining the best-laid plans to help them.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It's impossible to know for sure, but I think if President Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, the US would not have put men on the moon in the 1960s. Or 1970s. Perhaps not ever (so far).
Kennedy's martyrdom made the Apollo program a political third rail, so pretty much anybody with the potential power to cut its funding kept their mouth shut until the first successful landing. But nobody spends hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars without a lot of people wanting that money to be spent on something else that they think is more important.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I took care of my parents' cat at my house once and he basically did the same thing for the first week. He eventually came out of hiding. I'd say give it time.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
They need to withdraw active support and solidarity from the portions of their community that have adopted an unrepentant criminal lifestyle, the same way whites have done.
This is the key. I believe America will only be "post-racial" when we get to the point where, when a chronically disordered individual who happens to be black "fucks about and finds out" with the cops, the majority of black Americans who have jobs and no criminal record shrug and say "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", like I do when the same thing happens to some toothless, tatted up white meth addict. The fact that so many intelligent and educated black Americans continue to feel identification and kinship with thugs and knuckleheads simply because they share a skin color is baffling to me.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
48 hours to destroy your career.
Both West and Adams were already skating on thin ice with large targets painted on their backs, to mix metaphors, before the final incidents which completed their "cancellation". I work in tech and it's been at least five years since anybody felt comfortable sharing a Dilbert cartoon due to his outspoken support for Trump. Ye has been saying controversial shit for about as long.
I'm pretty sure every newspaper and publisher that was still carrying Dilbert or other Adams products were just waiting for him to say something bad enough to give them an ironclad excuse to drop him.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Attempting to point out the hypocrisy of a social justice movement that simultaneously argues that a) it's horribly racist for white people to be frightened by black people on account of the actions of a very small subset of black people and b) it makes perfect sense for people to be frightened by guns on account of the actions of a very small subset of gun owners.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices."
Actually, I've recently noticed that whenever a mass shooting occurs, very little time is spent blaming the shooter, and much more ink and airtime is spent on blaming guns, gun stores, gun manufacturers, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, inadequate mental health care, inadequate school security, cowardly cops that refuse to attempt to intervene, etc., etc., etc.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
99%+ of AR-15 owners don't commit mass shootings; it doesn't stop the half of the country that doesn't understand gun culture from finding all AR-15 owners at best suspicious and at worst actively threatening.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
As somebody with basically libertarian views (and therefore is very much out of tune with the current progressive zeitgeist) but who has also been involved in music and theater since early childhood, I am very much interested in this question, and have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. After reading the other comments in this thread, many of which I think are grasping at different parts of the elephant, there's one potential explanation that I haven't seen and that I would like to suggest:
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Parents know that some activities/careers are right-coded and some are left-coded.
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Children are likely to absorb some or all of their political opinions from their parents.
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Parents are likely to encourage their children to participate in the activities and/or career paths that are more aligned with their politics. For example, conservative parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in sports or cheering, and progressive parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in things like music, theater and art.
Or it could just be as simple as people naturally sorting themselves into groups of other people who are like them. If all the people you know from your church are on the football team, you're more likely to play football. If you're gay and the other two openly gay kids in your school do theater, you're more likely to do theater. (There was a discussion on here recently about the search for the first openly gay Premier League soccer player and the inability to find anybody like that, and while the idea of a genetic explanation is appealing to me, especially given the high percentage of female professional soccer players who are lesbians, I can't discount the argument put forward by others that if you're gay and everybody in the locker room of your youth soccer team is constantly spewing homophobic slurs, you're probably going to find something else to do for a living.)
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
There has been quite a bit of development of reactor technology, even just within what are now seen as the boring, old and busted design of Pressurized Light Water Reactors. So-called Gen III+ Reactors have substantial improvements in safety and operational efficiency (how much time they spend generating electricity (and thus $$$) vs. time spent shut down for maintenance).
The main way to subsidize costs would be guaranteed zero- or low-interest loans, combined with some reduction in red tape; the main thing that makes nuclear cost-prohibitive right now is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to go from "we're thinking about building a nuke plant here" to "actually generating electricity". The NRC safety certification process is important and shouldn't be circumvented, but what needs to be stopped is every single anti-nuclear organization being able to file NIMBY-lawsuit after NIMBY-lawsuit that keeps the project tied up, with loan interest accumulating the whole time.
Other more advanced reactor design concepts are interesting but PLWRs have 70 years of design and operational experience behind them now, which makes them quite hard to dislodge from their dominant market position.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The older I get, the more I realize I just don't have the mental or emotional energy to try and figure out who the good guys actually are in any of these things. So, my position has markedly shifted from "pro-Israel because based on everything I've seen and read about the conflict, Israel are the good guys" to "pro-Israel because Israel looks like civilization and Palestine looks like hell." I find it far easier to identify with Israel and Israelis; they look and act more like me than the other side. Simple as that. Pure tribalism.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I wouldn't overlook the possibility that the people in charge of promotions (who are likely to be married men themselves) might give preferable treatment to a married man, thinking to themselves, "this person has a family to support and needs the extra money more than a single man (or woman)". They might also think that a married man is more likely to prefer stability to opportunity and is therefore less likely to quit and move across the country to take another job.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
My reason for disliking Carter is that even though he (a Navy-trained nuclear engineer) understood what was going on during the Three Mile Island accident and could have told the nation that there was nothing to worry about, he apparently didn't want to upset anti-nuclear activists in his own party. While that was only a small part of the PR disaster that TMI was, in my mind that makes him partially to blame for why the US abandoned the adoption of nuclear power for electrical generation, which in turns make him partially responsible for global warming (very partially - it's not like Carter is responsible for what China and India have been doing or will continue to do in the next century).
I know good, pro-social, well-regulated people. I know crappy, anti-social, disordered people. I know devout religious people (mainly Christian), and I know totally secular atheists. I have yet to notice a strong correlation on the scatterplot of those two axes.
I would add that it's not like secular atheists don't have external regulatory systems, it's just more "I'm not going to do this thing that I might want to do otherwise because all of the people I know and like will think I'm a bad person for doing it" than "God will send me to hell if I do this thing".
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