georgioz
1hr ago
As any healthy man should, but it was a thing for a while. Just peruse the comment section, it became a meme with other reactions.
georgioz
2hr ago
But she is so vulnerable, for sure there are many predators who would use this vulnerability to abuse her. Look how innocent and playful and goofy she is, you need to be there for her and protect this rare pixie. Right?
I think this is category error, you see Margaret Qualley as attractive, it is hardly something that Christopher Walken can replicate. My two cents is that while Walken is actually goofy but still somehow dignified, Qualley to me seems actually insane, as if she is in the middle of manic episode of her bipolar disorder. But for some reason many men find that highly attractive. I remember way back when Candance Owens had this popular clip of weird voice and crazy look - and many men watched it in a loop finding it fascinating and attractive.
So maybe you are just into crazy women, you would not be the first one. It is well known I can fix her or Manic Pixie Dream Girl effect.
Sounds like the issue isn’t that the “nagging female companion” trope is too unrealistic, it’s that it’s too realistic of a depiction of many marriages—thus taking the escapism out of it and/or hitting too close to home.
Sure, I guess many of these are just projections of author, including using heroes as mouthpieces for their ideology. There are so many ruined project. For instance there was Steel Foundations - a 16th century knight from Holy Roman Empire is Isekaied into medieval fantasy world with levels and skills. What an amazing premise. Only the protagonist is not a 16th century knight, but basically your cookie-cutter nerd from San Francisco. He hates religion and he was a secret atheist, he actually hates authorities and he is secretly liberal, he takes shit from girlbosses around him and he is all for women equity. While he is is an atheist who mocks religion he at the same time loves to mediate and treats eastern mystics who know how to brew tea with great reverence and respect. His backstory is there just to make him wear plate armor, otherwise he is just a projection of author.
The same goes for many other things where the social structure is nonsensical. Imagine Walking Dead but dialed to eleven. Yes there is apocalypse, but there is still the same stupid drama as if we are in an episode of Friends with zombies. Rick also dedicates half if not more of his time to just keep bunch of morons in check. He is fighting zombies as much as his stupid wife and other whining morons from his group who complain about lack of toilet paper. It is basically a middle management bad office drama story, cheating wives, stupid kids doing stupid shit but just with zombies. In fact zombies are something like bad weather or environmental hazard, it could as well be a series about bunch of morons being transported to Alaska and slowly dying to diseases by eating berries or going to hug bears just to prove that Rick is incorrect. In fact it is completely good parallel with katana wielding badass diverse character who eventually becomes heroes romantic interest and 50 something abused wife Carrol, who becomes the best tactical genius, sniper and survivalist who single handedly dismantles fortified base of cannibal cultist as some Black Ops genius. But at least they are cooperative and supportive of Rick and his stupid wife died - I would considered it as a rare quality gem in litrpg if Rick had levels. In reality they would also be his wife in one.
She's Basil Exposition, there to conduct the background research and dripfeed the reader useful information that's too tedious for the protagonist to bother with. She provides Harry with some of his cool gadgets. Harry is the one putting his body on the line. Harry is the one who has to systematically lose his parent figures in the process of growing into the leader his people need him to be. Harry is the one who figures out the last pieces of puzzles at the last second when it really counts, and then actually defeats the bad guy.
This is just matter of perspective. In practice, it is Harry who is Basil Exposition for Hermione, especially given the gimmicky nature of how he receives his knowledge. If the story was written from Hermione's perspective, it would be much more interesting. She is out there in the library researching Nicolas Flamel, creating plans and plots only for Harry to casually drop stuff like randomly waking up screaming, speaking to snakes, and seeing visions of Voldemort torturing people - only to obsess about quidditch the next day as if nothing happens, leaving all the work to main protagonist Hermione.
The story would shift toward Hermione managing this Harry moron, who refuses to communicate (e.g. when he refused to talk to Hermione about seeing Grim in Prisoner of Azkaban), who endlessly whines about how bad he has it and, who has some inferiority complex trying to hard to be a hero only to be rescued like damsel in distress by Hermione. You would get your standard YA story where the main protagonist manages his team of moronic sidekicks who more than villains are there to foil his plans. Just think about all the time when Harry talking to Hermione would solve the plot in couple of days instead of whole year.
But Harry isn't just some buffoon protected by main character energy. Set his special chosen one status aside for a second. He may not be a star student, but the books are pretty explicit that this is because he prioritizes the battle against Voldemort over academics.
No, he does not prioritize that. Like I said before, he wallows in his trauma and refuses to communicate. He constantly switches priorities to stupid stuff like quidditch instead of the issue at hand or even communicating with the group. Other than Hermione, it is his chosen plot armor is his main redeeming quality.
Harry is also much more well-rounded than Hermione (in the model of the classic English gentleman. Being a broadly successful dilletant is good; being a single-minded striver is gauche).
He never is more well rounded. He is myopic, lack any planning or true talent except of dumb luck. And it even gets worse as Hermione shores up her academic/theoretic leanings by raw experience. If anything, managing Harry in earlier yeas is her training wheels - much as in some story the main hero takes care of his younger sibling or ailing mother.
Also Hermione is much better leader and even possesses better character. Just compare these two scenes: Harry is tortured in Goblet of Fire. Harry is tortured and he decides to stand and face Voldemort by pure grit and defiance. He cast his stupid expeliarmus and the nature of the curse makes it so that he resists Voldemorts curse by pure cosmic coincidence. Second scene: Harry is threatened by crucio tortue in Umbridge office. Harrys instinct is stubborn denial. However Hermione keeps her cool, pretends to fold invents complex story about Dumbledore's secret weapon in Forrest, thus leading Umbridge into a trap. This was the umpteenth time where Hermione bailed out that moron from deadly situation, so that the Voldemort could actually be defeated.
Hermione is as brave as Harry, but she goes about it more intelligently. She is proactive, strategic, she can rely on backup plans. In terms of leadership she is communicative, competent, mature, she has high moral integrity and by the end of the book she is very versatile monster of a witch, true enlightened gentlewoman. Harry is isolated self pitying whiner, inept, prone to distractions like quidditch. His redeeming qualities are his stubbornness - the other side of the coin of introversion and refusal to communicate. He is for sure brave, even stupidly so and his main redeeming qualities are plot armor in form of being the chosen one.
If I wanted to select who would be my colleague or coworker or even friend or role model after the whole ordeal, I would take Hermione over Harry all the time.
Sure, Hermione is not such a girboss in books - although that is arguably a little bit more grating to be honest at least in the beginning. However she shows quite a lot of growth, by the end of the series she is a monster who can cast every spell silently, she can best deatheaters in duels under high-pressure situation, she is genius in potions and transfigurations that she uses constantly to great effect etc. Harry on the other hand remains stagnant, from spellcraft he is one-trick pony using expeliarmus and patronus. Other than that he just utilizes pure gimmicks such as hic connection to Voldemort and psychic visions or pulling Gryffindor sword literally out of the hat just because. He is the series version of McGuffin, he is imbued asset managed and operated by Hermione according to Dumbledore's strategy. It is Hermione who does the heavy lifting such as actually researching on how to destroy horcruxes or painstaking training in spellcasting.
Ok, I mean, I get the desire for gritty warband-society fiction, but having zero women is not a natural or optimal state of most societies.
It's not just society warband gridmark fiction. It is any fiction, take Three Investigators that was famous genre during my time as young adult in 80ies and 90ies. The same with old Western books by Karl May such as Old Surehand or Czech version of it in form of books by Jaroslav Foglar, huge proponent of Boy Scouts and who created incredible world where boys had their own culture and hidden wars in Prague.
he Harry Potter example is strange - I have never seen a single complaint that it has too many female characters for the male readership's taste, until now, I suppose.
Really? You never read any analysis of how Hermione Granger is the true hero? I took it for granted that Harry Potter is just a lucky, brave but ultimately passive and reactive "chosen one for no reason" moron. The only thing that he really owns is his quidditch success, that is why he was such a good target for Eliezers fanfiction remake. Ron is comedic relief with loyalty as his best attribute. Hermione Granger is the ultimate hero of the story, she is the brain of the whole operation, she is proactive one who prepares for everything, who is there to get the group out of trouble and often is the only one capable to execute due to her diligence and knowledge of spells. She is basically managing the other two morons. Additionally such a group is hardly something normative, I cannot imagine any such group dynamics developing anywhere during my childhood.
And superhero comics? Really? You mean those superhero comics that famously don't have women acting with agency on par with men, ever?
These were nowhere near as popular especially compared to S-tier heroes like Spiderman, Superman or Batman, in fact most of the female led comics were on brink of cancelation in 1970s and 1980s with one exception of Wonder Woman. But I will give it to you as the same thing is happening with anime Tsundere phenomenon, so I guess nerds universally are attracted to sassy combative female characters who are there as a prize to be won if hero simps enough and takes the abuse.
I would believe it was it not for the fact that it is still happening even in male dominant subgenres like sci-fi and to some extent fantasy. Although there is significant part of female readers there (around 40%), the domination is almost complete and you can hardly find something for men and boys. There are some holdouts like Warhammer 40k that still hold 80%+ of male readership, but at this point the clock is ticking.
The point being that male readers are there, but they are not catered to. That is why they move over to other stuff. The situation is similar to what happened to superhero genre or comics, which also have majority male readership but that is increasingly catering to female readers. So men and boys react by going over to anime such as Berserk or Chainsaw man and not whatever gay/feminist slop is produced now in mainstream DC and Marvel comics.
The same goes for literature for boys. There is no replacement for old Cowboy pulp fiction or various adventure books or genre like The Three Investigators, where male/boy heroes only interaction with women is to get sandwich from them. Modern young adult writing is at best Harry Potter clone, where there has to be some know-it-all nagger like Hermione Granger or some female professor hero. The old style of literature of 100% male space is completely gone from modern publishing and especially Young Adult publishing, which became utter gay/feminist slop with mandatory diversity quotas for characters like in Hollywood.
No, seriously. If you feel like you're a guy, and you don't read enough, stop forcing yourself to read highbrow literature or books like you feel you should read, and track down some lowbrow junkfood. I suggest /r/Romance_For_Men , /r/HFY , /r/ProgressionFantasy , or anything on the royalroad front page. If you're a parent of one or more boys, point them toward the pig food dispenser. And I need to clarify that I am not being hyperbolic here. Just like babies have to eat mashed-up food before they can chew through steaks, young men need a regular diet of sophomoric fantasies before they're ready for Asimov or Murakami. Yes, there's a certain risk that the Heinlens and Ayn Rands of the world will feed them masculinist fantasies incompatible with the feminist-egalitarian view of the world you might prefer to instill... but hey, at least that's better than whatever the TikTok algorithm would have done to them.
Interestingly enough I am a fan of LitRPG and progression fantasy and this space is absolutely horrible. It is riddled with various feminist tropes that make it unreadable for me and I think large part of male population. In general this slop genre is riddled with something I call "nagging female companion", that literally abuses the nerdy incel male hero to oblivion while at the same time serves as some kind of supposed "prize" and "source of tension". The hero needs to power up in order to deserve romantic interest from such a bitch and he swoons over her for no reason, while she does not bring any value to him except of nagging, disrespect and drama. She is there just as a foil and to keep the hero back. The author Phil Tucker is king of this genre, such as with his Dawn of The Void series where the hero is literal homeless alcoholic who shares System Apocalypse with literal female crackhead to whom he trauma bonds. I did not manage to read too far into it, but the start is literal toxic abuse that would be grounds for immediate decapitation if it was not female "companion" but some male villain.
Paradoxically one way to avoid this is by having a female protagonist, you have rare Ellen Rippley style character like in Azarinth Healer, where by virtue of being female she does not give a shit about some nagging disrespecting sidechick. Other escape is autistic power fantasy of male protagonist who does not give a shit such as in Primal Hunter or Defiance of the Fall and the like - who are basically Conan The Barbiarian style pulp fiction male fantasy characters with extra steps. However these are surprisingly rare. It is impossible to find genre where you have just bunch of male friends doing the progression and apocalypse, while women are actually supportive of them and do not create some stupid drama or are just background noise. Even military litrpg authors cannot help themselves and they do have to introduce some version of hated purple haired Admiral Holdo wannabe or some sarcastic and sassy katana wielding female Captain Marvel type of character.
And that is just feminist tropes. Other tropes are sarcastic nihilist know-it-all moron who moralizes over world where he was Isekaied - ideally telling them how slavery or religion is bad, throwing some bad and dated cultural puns plus literal Atheism+ with dense dose of progressive spices - one example is Jason from He Who Fights with Monsters. Other than that there is the anime incel tropes of some gamer moron who is dumb, stupid and mentally and socially inept but somehow became The Chosen One by sheer luck. But the most time it is all three, a moralizing Atheism+ moronic dumb incel being the Chosen one, who has some nagging combative female sidechick or at least some system who is there to create drama and tension and with whom he trauma bonds, and who throws bad dated puns and Young Adult/Marvel style of grating supposedly comedic relief that has no place in the setting. The landscape is very dry to be sure.
I stand corrected, you are right that all of them were indeed treated with suspicion and many of theme actually became targets of White Terror except of small cadre. Horthy's power was based on former POWs from Italy and France - same as Czechosovakia, but in our case it was due to time reasons as Czechoslovak legion in Russia did not come home until late 1919. Nevertheless they were celebrated as loyal anticommunists and acknowledged for their contribution toward better diplomatic position during Versailles and Trianon treaties, while legionaires from France and Italy did contribute toward early wars to safeguard borders. My bad to project this history onto Hungary, which was a different beast. So these loyalists were probably the most unlucky bunch of Hungarians who took it from both sides. Thanks for that, I learn something new every day.
Food preparation / cooking is predominately or exclusively done by women in 98% of studied primitive societies
Shit biased anthropology study as usual, where they deliberately defined cooking strictly as "domestic, daily meal preparation at the family hearth". We can even skip communal or ritualistic cooking in the agricultural primitive societies done by men or men doing many cooking related tasks such as gathering fuel for hearth, skinning and butchering game, milling and other labor intensive cooking related work that was defined out of scope of this shit study.
Hunters and gatherer societies and to large extent also pastoralist and agricultural males cook all the time, they embark upon hunting trips or group male activities that can take from days to weeks. So they process game, they butcher and cook it. Moreover they are also able to repair their clothes and tools. It is not as if cooking is taboo haram activity for men, it is just logical division of labor. Domestic cooking and cleaning is delegated to women, because they have to stay with kids in safe domestic environment anyways. Hunting, hard labor related to construction, wood cutting and storage, herding other work outside is domain of men. But there is blending of the two - young girls can go gathering berries or herding livestock, especially poultry. The same with young men.
georgioz
1d ago
They did back in Hungary. In early days the threath of international communist revolution was real. Horthy brought about white terror in Hungary and these loyalists Hungarians from Russia were backbone of his power. So the naming is legitimate
It's there in Wikipedia, this is also what I remember from history channels regarding the whole thing. Czechoslovak legion in Russia was originally okay with being transported to Vladivostok to leave, it was not until after this conflict in Chelyabinsk where the things escalated, and even that was forced by Germans who wanted loyalist Hungarians back ASAP. Nevertheless these loyalist/White Hungarians were seen as suspicious by Reg Hungarians post WW1, however these whites then in turn formed the power base of admiral Miklós Horthy's government in Szeged (not these from Russia, but POWs from Italy and France) for his coup, which formed a government that endured up until WW2.
Sure, but what I meant is that knowing how to prepare meal or even sewing and repairing ones clothes was not seen as some taboo girly thing that no proper man can ever do.
he Hungarians were mostly seeking a practical way to get home (in a Western direction) as soon as possible.
Funnily enough the Czech and Slovaks from Czechoslovak legion in Russia wanted to get to fight on western front for Allies, so it was agreed by Russians that they should evacuate by going east to be picked by allied ships Vladivostok - which eventually happened between 1919-1920. The whole rebellion started when they had conflict with white loyalist Hungarian soldiers in Chelyabinsk, who went west along the same railway but west to fight for Austrian-Hungary. Some legionnaires were arrested after the conflict by Russians, so the rest decided to free their battle brothers and took the whole city under control. The rest is very interesting history.
By the way later those Red Hungarians who did not return to fight for Austria-Hungary but chose to stay to fight for Bolsheviks were also among the leaders in Hungarian Soviet Republic including its leader Béla Kun, who was personal friend of Lenin. Also Czechoslovak legionnaires who returned home were also pivotal in defeating Red Hungarians in a war fought from declaration of independence in October 1918 to summer of 1919, so there was a rematch of a kind there also with Red Hungarians instead of the White ones and Czechoslovak legions in France and Italy and not Russia.
georgioz
5d ago
This is anachronism. The virtuous man should be self-sufficient. Hunters, trappers, soldiers and any other man had to know how to hunt/raise game/cattle, butcher it an cook it. Having inept friend who does not know how feed himself without his mummy was always sign of weakness. Even inside household they did these things since time immemorial including any heavy lifting job such as preparing firewood for hearth etc. Cooking by men was never some taboo, it was always subject to practical domestic division of labor.
What do you mean. Do you not have to file your taxes or you go to jail? Do businessmen and ordinary people not have to spend labor and money to comply with regulatory system or otherwise they will be fined and potentially criminally prosecuted under threat of violence from police? How is it not forced labor.
The main point is that this is invisible to the government. It just offloads these costs over to the private sphere and does not care anymore. People just conform. Of course billions of people now have to click trillions of times to reject cookies or whatever other stupid regulation requires them to do from now on to forever, it is just fact of life that we need to cope with in our learned helplessness, another piece of straw attached to our backs.
The forced labor part was really straining my suspension of disbelief. Waiting in line to recycle your cans using the German system. The horror. It is basically Sered' all over again. They do not even reimburse you for the water you need to clean your cans. I am sure that Amnesty International will start a new campaign on the drink can slavery problem any day now.
What suspension of disbelief, I was not writing a fantasy and it was just an example. The actual price of used can is around 0.5 to 1 cent. The cost of empty PET plastic bottle is tenth of that. What do you disbelieve - that you literally wash trash, store it in your flat where you pay EUR 5000 per square meter and waste time transporting it to the grocery store where it has to be processed by some vending machine with more energy and labor from store clerks and truck drivers? What did I say that is fantasy. The whole system actually depends on people not returning the thrash, just learned helplessness and accepting additional tax.
The actual benefits of these policies are net negative, countries in EU did have garbage collection solved for decades. This is just a ritual that is enforced by government on people for basically no practical reason. The social cost of this system in Slovakia is around EUR 100 million at least, maybe around 0.1% of GDP. On its own it is not so much, but it adds up with everything else. It is death by thousand cuts, there are thousands of new regulations and directives poured out of the state machine every single year, each of them associated with small cost. The end result is $20 burrito that you cannot afford. There is no simple solution to this, that was my main point.
Taxation is what it is - forced confiscation of wealth and labor. The more important thing however is that it creates deadweight loss. Additionally, it is subject to exponential impact. Increasing taxation from 1% to 2% of your income is negligeble, increasing it from 75% to 76% decreases your purchasing power significantly. We are closer to the latter now.
My main point is that legal market interaction increasingly stops making sense and tax and regulation evasion is how you can best get ahead. The $20 burito is here to stay, unless things change radically. So cooking at home is a new norm.
I was thinking about it from the EU point of view of a regular employee and I think a lot of this comes from how insane the modern state costs. Let me make my case from numbers in Slovakia.
Direct income and payroll taxes in Slovakia for average salary is around 45%. This includes social contribution, income tax and all the rest. Out of 55% that is left you pay 23% VAT on all goods and services. Other than that you need to pay property tax, excise taxes for gas, alcohol and tobacco. In reality, you might be left with about a third of what you earned. But it doesn't even end there.
Fees and other direct payments There is constant and very opaque stream of various payments. You pay for building permits, you pay for your passport or other state documents, you pay car registration fee, you pay road tax and highway toll, you pay even a fee for your dog. It is numerous small things that however add up quite quickly and more if you are bellow average income as many of these are just nominal prices.
Indirect taxes These are various hidden taxes often paid by producers. Manufacturers also pay various taxes and fees: they pay for carbon emissions, they pay packaging recycling fees, and they pay customs duties on imported raw materials. Or take another example: developers pay cities and the state infrastructure development fees and for social policies, because what cities collect from your income tax and property tax isn't enough for them. Builders, of course, pass all of this into the price of your apartment, and you end up paying VAT on top of that non-transparent indirect taxation as well. All of this drives up final prices and reduces your purchasing power out of the pittance you have left.
Forced labor. The state has literally enslaved people, demanding labor for absurdities—like how you have to wash out beverage cans at home like an imbecile so they don't smell and attract wasps, and then wait in line at grocery store for the one functional reverse vending machine, just so the state returns your stolen, exorbitant recycling deposit, the recovery of which cost you a bunch of time and your own water. But it also enslaves companies and individuals through filling out various forms. You pay accountants for tax returns, and companies must comply with regulations like GDPR, for which they have to hire extra consultants like a GDPR Data Protection Officer. They have to fill out paperwork, they have to pay corporate lawyers and attorneys who must track thousands of new directives, regulations, and amendments that the EU and member states churn out every year. Behind this is an army of office workers who produce nothing, not even a single nail—they only produce paperwork for the state bureaucracy, such as the new paperwork on the gender pay gap in your company according to the latest EU directive, because that is exactly what was missing for perfect prosperity in our countries. And the great thing for the government? This is officially considered added value, and you pay VAT on it too. It’s a perpetuum mobile, where every new hidden regulation brings an increase in corporate costs, which companies then use to raise prices, and that increases tax revenue at the expense of your wallet.
Conclusion: The Shift to Autarky If you add everything up, your real purchasing power is maybe a quarter of what you produced. This spiral of higher tax and regulatory burdens completely demotivates people from producing. Even now, domestic autarky combined with bartering and undeclared work—which is tax-free and unregulated—is paying off for people. If you cook that $20 burrito at home, perhaps using your own ingredients from your garden, you bypass this entire machinery. The state is shocked by the "illegal" sale of homemade Christmas cakes. A person who bakes cakes and sells the leftovers is now literally treated as an enemy of the state, simply because they found one of the few remaining ways to increase their standard of living without non-stop bleeding. And yet this I think is what people are feeling right now. It is not exactly affordability crisis, it is just that some things are so overpriced that it stops making sense.
You will not be around these "pleasant" people for long, because they will suicidally turn your neighborhood into a shithole and then possibly move away from you to do damage elsewhere. It is false dilemma such as saying you don't like pitbulls roaming the streets and breeding, but you do not mind living next to neighbors who feed and protect them, because they are nice animal loving people and they mean well.
georgioz
6d ago
If you will live around this type of Democrat then that you will also get Muslim immigrant as well as ruined school, criminals and the rest of it. It is a package deal and it is literally what happened over in Michigan and why there is a Muslim candidate in the first place.
georgioz
6d ago
This is aged old tactics of fake sympathy where you blur the difference between jab and reality, maintaining plausible deniability. It can be something like "I'd never buy Toyota Camry given how it breaks down every other week leaving John stranded and missing work". You just plant this idea in people's mind making it acceptable to talk about at least in this indirect manner.
That's one way to put it. Have Qualley get some weight, give her baseball hat and sweatpants and you get this. But I still thing that Qualley has some je ne sais quoi of craziness at least in my eyes, Raygun is actually funny although unintentionally.
However there is something else going on with Qualley. She is a professional dancer and ballerina, those moves are controlled and the more they look erratic, the more you are drawn into the manipulation, the more you experience the whiplash. It is nowhere near goofy, it is precise and intentional, it is meta level madness here - it looks like random seizure but it is precise and methodical. It is that exact whiplash that may be subconsciously attractive. Like Candance Owens, mother in her late 30ies looking like a girl with perfect skin and delivering slightly threatening rant. It is the juxtaposition that many men find attractive.
More options
Context Copy link