gorge
11d ago
But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.
If I thought my child was actually being influenced by trans-influencers, there is no limit to the drastic action I might take, and many on my side feel the same way. Ideally, I would be able to get them off of it just by explaining how dumb and wrong the influencers are, but if that was not enough, and I had to remove them from a peer and school and institutional situation that really had the tentacles wrapped around my child, God grant me the courage to do any action necessary, including selling my house and moving to a different state.
gorge
11d ago
Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them.
You could certainly make a case that the jinogist and glorification of war that was common in all media from 1900 to 2005 or so, was it's own egregore that was interested in propagandizing your sons and feeding them into the meat grinder. Is a media diet of the Union Jack which results in your son volunteering charging a machine gun in World War I actually all that much worse than a media diet of something that risks turning your son gay or trans? It seems there are always powers and principalities who wish to chew up, use, and discard your children for their own purposes -- defending against these is the difficult and never-ending job of a parent.
I hope to be able to teach my own sons the proper balance between having a healthy desire for cultivating manly valor, but also not jumping to volunteer for stupid wars for stupid and evil leaders.
gorge
11d ago
But the bottom line is: Isn’t it kind of convenient that my moral inclinations and my opinions of the practical difficulties of implementing a ban line up so well for different activities?
Eh, I think a teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem. I think the optimal strategy is to control the peer group years ahead of time by selecting locations and activities -- but that itself is very difficult, because there are few communities that are aligned on these kind of values any more.
There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”
It's wild to me that according to the hive-mind, the only thing you should teach your child about sex is 1) the importance of proper consent and 2) birth control. There is never anything on /r/parenting about teaching your the importance of discerning proper character of the person to have sex with; nor anything about teaching your child how long to wait or under what circumstances to have sex (waiting for love, waiting for marriage, etc.). The idea that "consent" is the all-important thing, and marriage or even "love" doesn't matter at all seems like a complete shift from the Zeitgeist 30 years ago. I mean, 30 years ago was a pretty loose time, but at least there was a debate about the proper time to have sex, now it is just assumed that parents should not give any guidance about it.
gorge
11d ago
It's interesting that everyone here is ignoring the sex of the child in question.
Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "
Teenage drinking is lindy for teenage boys ... but not for unmarried, unchaperoned girls.
gorge
1mo ago
It wouldn't be a favor to Harris, she would get all this press attention and have to smile for the press in order to get an absolutely empty gesture right after suffering an all-timer humiliating defeat. If Biden did it, the smart move for Harris would be to resign herself and pass the honor of first woman president to Nancy Pelosi.
gorge
1mo ago
We need more than that. She needs to be officially sworn in, get her portrait on the wall, be listed in the history books, etc.
gorge
1mo ago
It would be chef's kiss if he could resign and make Kamala the first woman president. From my point of view, this would be great because it removes "make history and elect the first woman president" as a talking point in future elections. From Biden's view, it would have the appearance of making history and being magnanimous while in effect being an absolute humiliation and revenge.
gorge
1mo ago
I will never forgive Gorsuch for Bostock.
The conservative court picks, definitely slow down woke, that's the advantage of not having a woke/establishment president. But they don't actually reverse previous woke and fix the country. They don't even stop woke movement entirely, again, Bostock.
gorge
1mo ago
Aren't there still a lot of ballots left? CA is only 54% reported, for instance.
gorge
1mo ago
It's a very difficult problem for anyone who is anti-establishment.
The default is that being president is really being elected to be the scapegoat. The president does not actually have that much power to change the big trends that make people happy or unhappy with their situation.
So if you have a woke/establishment president, they end up cementing woke rule with their court picks, administrative rulings, funding decisions, DoJ prosecution decisions, EEOC appointments, etc. And then when you elect a fire-breathing ant-establishment politician they spend all their energy thrashing and on petty beefs, get nothing done, and then end up the scapegoat for all the problems that have accumulated over the past ten years.
gorge
1mo ago
Aren't witnesses legally required to testify, under penalty of being held in contempt of court?
I think what most women want is to be enraptured by a powerful, handsome, high-status man and "it just happened."
This is exactly what is portrayed in one of the most famous romantic scenes in motion picture history, a scene long renowned by women for how "hot" and "sexy" it was:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=l0976pL8iTw&themeRefresh=1
What this scene portrays is by modern standards sexual assault. She tells him to stop, never gives consent, and he kisses her anyway.
Another example of this is the Suits Matt and Rachel file room sex scene -- no consent, he yanks her toward him, they have sex. That's rape by college campus standards, but again, it's considered one of the hottest scenes in TV history by women.
Now, when things end badly, two sayings come to mind: "hell has no fury like a woman scorned." "What women hate, hate, hate with the passion of the thousand suns is finding out the man they had sex with is not actually as high status as they thought." So if he is a chad but he scorns her, or it turns out in the light of day all her friends think he is a total dork, or a few weeks later it turns out her husband is a more powerful force in her life than her adultery partner -- then "it just happened" gets retconned as rape. In some of metoo stories there are admissions that the women only changed their mind about the incident days or years later after "reflection." I also think people, and especially many women, have an incredible ability to self-modify their own feelings and so they will actually believe that it was "rape."
I think the archetype sexy rape fantasy is the following scenario: woman is already very attracted to man, but refuses sex because of some powerful societal force or other reluctance unrelated to attraction ("my parents won't let me" "we are out in public" "you are too much of a rogue" "I'm holding out for a nice guy" "You just sacked my entire village and kidnapped me") but the man overpowers her anyways, thus showing that he is more powerful than all the things that she feared or worried about. And I would wager that most women would get turned on by this kind of fantasy.
Now in the case of ambush rape by a hobo, I suspect the woman understands that this man is, despite his temporary physical domination, low status and thus she is not actually all that aroused by him. Perhaps there is some pleasure in the middle of the act, but it is quickly erased in the clarity of the aftermath. The trauma still exists in the idea that she had forcible sex with a low-status man.
It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction. Under more recent laws, mostly obsolete, it was only rape if she screamed and tried to fight, otherwise the woman is liable for severe punishment of committing adultery. It's possible that some kinds or rape would be enjoyable for many women, but are also terrible for society to allow. Imagine there was a law that rape was legal "if she enjoys it" or "rape is legal for 6' professional athlete chads because on average women will enjoy it." It might actually be the case that women would get some pleasure from such a law -- but it would be an absolute disaster for society. So in this case society has two choices 1) admit the real crime is against the father or husband -- which is not possible under feminism or 2) force women to act as if they were traumatized them and treat them as damaged if they admit enjoying it. Personally, as a man, if my wife was ambush raped, I would not want society telling her, "actually tell your husband how much you enjoyed it, it's ok, drop the stigma." Society should be telling women "your husband or future husband is higher status than the guy who raped you, you should be ashamed and disgusted by the sex with that low status guy."
To start, the idea that Trump is the next Hitler is obviously crazy, overheated political rhetoric. Trump is nothing like Hitler, historical fascism was a movement born out of millions of angry World War I veterans and nothing like it exists or could exist today.
Part of the issue is that American education stinks and so there is simply no broad frame of reference for strongman leaders other than the good leftwing/progressive guys (FDR, Lincoln) and Hitler. You can't compare Trump to a Salazar, Pinochet, Sulla, Hidenberg, Caesar, Augustus, etc, because people simply don't know history well enough.
However, there is a bit of a "woke more correct" element to the Nazi accusations. Historically, communism/progressivism/leftism was an alliance between the intelligensia and aristocrats with the lowest classes. Fascism was renegade aristocrats and a lower-middle-class alliance. Second, Trump's base actually does want him to be much more of a "dictator" than Trump himself wants to be, but sometimes he gives signals as if he is going to play along. Trump's base actually wants him to act alike a real executive in control of the government -- they want him to fire employees and close departments (contra civil unconstitutional civil service law), they want him to ignore unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings, they want him to take strict and harsh measures that are morally beyond the pale by the standards of the current establishment. Overall, the wishes of Trump's base do pose an existential threat to the current post-New Deal, soft-socialist expertocracy. Thus you can see that the left has a working definition of fascism as being: "An alliance of a strongman with the lower-middle class that poses an existential threat to socialist (soft or hard) bureaucratic state." By that working definition, you can seen how Trump does match the pattern.
Ultimately, this is a case of Scott Alexander's worst argument in the world. You rhetorically group A and B together, when A is something with really terrible connotations, in order to have those connotations rub off on B.
- Nazism was a movement of a strongman leading the lower-middle class in order to become dictator, invade Poland, start a world war, and genocide six million Jews.
- Trump shows strongman tendencies, and he is a lower-middle class populist leader.
- Ergo, Trump has smiliarities with Nazis. Therefore, we can call him Nazi and then all the other things associated with Nazism (killing millions of people) get associated with Trump.
gorge
2mo ago
What size contract, awarded to Musk-related-entities next year by the Trump-II admin, would you consider similarly presumptively corrupt?
There is no amount that I would consider presumptively corrupt. If Trump-II gave Elon a $1 trillion dollar contract to put a man on Mars, I'd be perfectly OK with that.
gorge
2mo ago
Therefore why not promote gay marriage as an alternative?
Marriage being monogamous is not legally enforceable. It's not even an officially taught value at this point. It's basically surviving as a folk tradition. There is no reason to think that gays getting marriage would actually be monogamous, and from what I have read they are not. So gay marriage is more likely to further erode the convention that marriage is monogamous.
I think Andrew Sullivan made this argument decades ago, and faced opposition from other gay activists at the time who held that gay people should not try to force themselves into heteronormative strictures or whatever.
And we got gay marriage and instead of monogamous gay men we got NY Times and NPR normalizing polyamory and CDC approving DoxyPep.
If a gay person asks you, "how should I live my life", and the only answer is "sorry, you have no place in my conception of society, unless you commit to lifelong celibacy and loneliness, in which case you may quietly sit in the corner" then can you blame them for turning elsewhere?
I don't think lifelong celibacy == loneliness. If a gay man asked me this question, I'd point him to a testimony of a gay man who went celibate and found himself a lot better off, and I'd recommended the gay man read it and try it out.
But also, in no world would I ban two men from being roommates, nor should the government be busting down doors or installing hidden cameras to see what is going on in the bedroom. "Gay marriage" does not be legalized in order for two men to form a permanent loving relationship -- amore or caritas.
gorge
2mo ago
No, I mean racially white. I'm making an HBD assertion -- "white men" are simply the best at war. Occidentals are second, blacks last. Obviously your liberal, fat, atomized, and vidya-addicted Redditor is not currently dangerous to the regime. But he is potentially dangerous, which is why he is subjected to large amounts of propaganda that either pacifies him or redirects his energies. And it is of course the white men on whom the propaganda hasn't taken that the regime is most actively concerned with.
I haven't followed the FEMA stuff, but there has been a libertarian claim "the purpose of police is to prevent private citizens from enforcing the law." For a long time I scoffed at it, but I've slowly come around. When I watched the BLM protests there were a lot of police out on the street, but a lot of people were engaging in looting, disorderly conduct, street blocking, etc, with total impunity. But of course, if a group of concerned citizens had come out with clubs to beat up the vandals and looters, the police would have come down hard on them. In some cases there are videos of police arresting citizens who are trying to pull protestors away from blocking the street.
What it comes down to is that it is simply easier for the police to arrest Joe taxpayer-with-something-to-lose for vigilantism, than it is to stop a mob of BLM protestors. Furthermore, it may be more of an embarrassment, a challenge to their manhood, if a private citizen is enforcing the law. The elite don't like the private citizen enforcing the law either, a BLM protest they can contain, private citizens enforcing the law would be far more unpredictable. This model also predicts why despite blatant disorderly crime being so common and unpunished, and gangland violence being common, actual murdering of white children is very rare in a city. The police do take this seriously, because they know threat of arrest won't be enough to stop parents from engaging in vigilantism. So the police still have to do enough actual law enforcement to keep crime to a barely tolerable level.
There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.
Getting back to FEMA, I don't think this is a case of FEMA consciously having orders to punish rural Trump voters. But, as a bureaucracy, they probably have some mandate that says, "our job is to establish chain of command and authority over the disaster area, so we don't have chaos and anarchy, and decision making comes through us." Sounds sensible to people in Washington sitting in the office coming up with the plans. But on the ground, in the middle of the disaster, it turns out it is far easier to stop people from helping, to stop people from flying helicopters in, than it is for FEMA itself to actually analyze and approve all incoming resources, or for FEMA itself to do the providing of resources. So the plan initially is:
- Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval to ensure scarce resources are not misallocated, that there are no airspace collisions, etc.
- Approve allocation of resources, approve flights as requested based on our analysis
- Bring in resources from outside for people.
But then in the fog of war it becomes:
- Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval.
- (too hard, falls through cracks)
- (too hard, falls through cracks)
So the actual result of the organization is that it is an anti-disaster relief bureaucracy. Conquest's third law strikes again.
gorge
2mo ago
I keep thinking about the rot here, and I think it goes back to in a certain sense that modern WEIRD people have a really hard time — for whatever reason— settling serious boundaries around things that should be obvious. ...We can’t really say “no” on deconstruction of our heritage, the denigrating of our heroes, or the insistence that other people’s history or culture be taught alongside our own.
I'm partial to the "the lights went out with World War I" thesis. Very simply, valorous, self-confident, fertile, expansionist, white men are the most dangerous force in the known universe. I certainly don't believe that white men are the most evil force in the universe, but we are the most dangerous. White people, white men, are most scared of other white men, and so a lot of apparent self-sabotaging behavior is a back-handed way of trying to sabotage competing white men. But psyopping other white men into being self-sabotaging without self-sabotaging yourself turns out to be impossible.
gorge
3mo ago
Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement. Shes objectively achieved enough that her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts that ive come to expect from my male friends.
Honestly, sounds like you have been mind-killed by modern media. Real, actually living women are like this. From this comment and other comments sounds like you have a great catch.
gorge
3mo ago
I don't understand the fixation that conservative Christians have with sex acts that aren't PIV. I just don't get it. If you don't like them, don't partake in them, but don't try and make someone else's life miserable just because you ascribe to those beliefs.
American culture and institutions are actively promoting experimental sex acts though -- from the books in schools to pride parades every June to media on TV to the State Department flying flags at embassies worldwide that have colors to represent erotic tendencies. It's not the Christians are not the only party who are obsessed. Christians think these things are bad, and thus, to the extent that we have common culture (public schools, parades, mass media) that sends messaging about sex acts, it would rather that message discourage non-martial non-PIV rather than encourage it.
gorge
3mo ago
I was tapped into the circles that had been discussing alternatives to a dollar standard for a while, so I knew exactly why bitcoin was so exciting. It was only a $1 a coin, I was making six figures at the time with minimal expenses, so putting down $100 or $500 (or $10,000) to take a flyer would have been a no-brainer move, except that I was too cowardly. I console myself with the knowledge I have done financially very well regardless, and with the thought that if I was a bitcoin billionaire I would have a new set of problems, like worrying about kidnapping.
cc /u/amadan
How is a healthy non-hetero relationship something that fits that definition?
To put it bluntly, the problem is not a loving (caritas) relationship between two men or two women, which is all fine and good, the problem is using each other as mutual masturbation aids or sticking dicks up each others poopy holes. I would suggest that doing so is like eating that potato chip or masturbating to porn. It feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves you empty and just wanting more stimulation/titillation while building a habit of mind that ultimately makes a person unsatisfied and less happy than they would be if the relationship was affectionate but not erotic.
When I listen to clips like these from Diane Ehrensaft or Johanna Olson-Kennedy I absolutely get a sense that The Adversary is in the room.
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