Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
4m ago
That's fair. I guess from a compositional standpoint, what little of her music I'm familiar with screams "pop for teenaged girls" for me, even the more recent stuff, even if the lyrical content is more mature than one would expect of pop for teenaged girls.
Folamh3
13m ago
I feel the chances are good the goalposts would move again.
What are you basing this accusation on?
And my experience with "citation needed" is no citation will be accepted anyway.
That was needlessly rude. "There's no point providing evidence for my factual claims, because even if I do you people won't believe me anyway" seems profoundly out of keeping with the ethos of this space.
Folamh3
15hr ago
But that's actually my question - in the 1970s, were there actually any unmarried childless women in their thirties showing up to Elvis gigs and literally fainting with excitement?
Sorry, when referring to Taylor Swift as a teenybopper I meant that her music's primary target demographic is and always has been teenage girls, not that she herself is a teenager.
Folamh3
16hr ago
I at least suspect that I am actually being called to narrow and limit my artistic tastes.
What makes you think that?
Folamh3
17hr ago
Two words: Elvis Presley. Nothing's changed much here recently.
If you look at videos of Elvis performing in his prime, I think most of the people going hysterical and literally fainting were teenage girls. I think that's largely Freddie's point: that certain behaviour which is acceptable in teenagers is very unbecoming in adults who ought to know better. Which includes many Swifties. I absolutely think the phenomenon of unmarried childless thirty-plus women spending small fortunes in order to go see a teenybopper on tour is a new one, actually.
C.S. Lewis answered that one
But C.S. Lewis did have varied and challenging artistic tastes! There's nothing wrong with a person in their thirties reading YA fiction in addition to reading books intended for adults. It's when YA fiction, fantasy, sci-fi etc. is all that you read that it becomes a sign of immaturity.
Folamh3
17hr ago
For some reason leftists tend to consider shaming and social pressure as completely irrelevant factors of the environment. I've brought this up in discussions on reddit, that maybe "fat-shaming" actually effectively helps people maintain a healthy weight, and this idea is usually met with disdain. However, leftists are highly inconsistent on this point, as they surely believe shaming people for racism to be highly effective and critical in stopping racism.
Funnily enough, I made a similar point about a year ago:
Fat acceptance activists, as a group, do not acknowledge any social influences on their condition whatsoever. Hence all the hysterical caterwauling about how diets don't work and teasing fat people just makes them sad and I'm just big-boned and so on and so forth. I suspect quite a lot of fat acceptance activists wouldn't even recognise the joke in the meme above, they literally believe that diet and nutrition have zero impact, none, on how much you weigh. In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8.
We permit some things and forbid others. Same as every other time and place in history.
Yes, and an "overly permissive" society is a society in which too many things are permitted and too few are forbidden. Not a difficult concept to grasp, I would've thought.
Are these the actions of a society that encourages "doing whatever you want"?
The word "encourage" or any of its synonyms appears nowhere in my post. As far as I grasp Freddie's point, it's not that following the path of least resistance (expending the least amount of effort) is encouraged, but doing the bare minimum isn't forbidden i.e. is permitted.
Sure, you can dress smart casual... as you work nights and weekends (and respond to emails and texts even when you're not "working") to get that big project over the finish line.
No idea what the point is meant to be here. The dress code in my last job, my current job and the job before that (post-Covid) was smart casual. My hours were 9-5 and I rarely had to work late, and never nights. In the two years I worked in my last job there was one occasion in which I had to work on the weekend. I don't think my experience is at all uncommon.
how exactly is anyone supposed to have time to enjoy anything with these cataclysmic threats constantly lurking in the background?
I doubt that, say, King Louis XIV knew how to cook for himself. He had people to do it for him. Should he have been ashamed of himself?
I think so. Is there any skill more fundamental to self-preservation than the ability to feed oneself?
I find that hot so I'm all for it.
Gross.
Antifa and BLM rioters, pro-Palestine student protesters
Go to any one of these protests, and you will find that 20% of the people protesting are true believers and 80% of people are there because their friends were going, or because they're hoping to signal that they're the right kind of person on Instagram, or because they want to get laid. Nothing is more performative or insincere than modern wokeness. How many of the people who shared a black square on their Instagram in June 2020 had even the slightest idea of what the intended message of said image was? You think everyone who ever dressed up in black bloc gear earns a living at the local vegan co-op or working for an activist nonprofit? I'm sure an absolute majority of these people subsequently put away childish things and took a cushy job at Merrill Lynch.
But you can't accuse them of concealing anything.
In punk (and by extension Antifa) circles, pretending that you're from a less affluent background than you really are is so common that satire websites poke fun at it. And while you might concede this point, it's certainly not like leftist apparatchiks would conceal something as fundamental as their ethnic back- oh wait, damn.
Folamh3
20hr ago
Freddie deBoer has a new article out in which he argues that our society has become overly permissive (without ever actually using the phrase "the permissive society"). He uses a few recent articles to set the scene (an increasingly defeatist sense among the laptop class that there's no option but to be extremely online; a qualified defense in the New Yorker and New York magazine of the notion of being an iPad parent), before getting into the meat of his argument. Where before our society expected people to behave in a certain way most of the time, increasingly there's a broad sense that all lifestyles are equally valid; that there's nothing wrong with following the path of least resistance (in terms of effort expended), at all times in every sphere of your life; and that people who do hold people to higher standards of behaviour than the bare minimum are being toxic in some way. Where before the expectation was to dress formally in the office, now "smart casual" rules the day (if that); where before it was only profoundly autistic and unemployable men still playing with Lego and cosplaying as Star Wars characters in their thirties, now such behaviour has become entirely normalised among the gainfully employed. The boilerplate celebrity interview question "What book are you currently reading?" was retired years ago: no one is reading books anymore, or if they are, it's the same YA slop their teenage children, nieces and nephews are reading. If modern Anglophone has a telos, it's "umm, let people enjoy things??"
Freddie's point is well-taken and I agree with most of it: Disney and Marvel adults are contemptible, as are adults taking out second mortgages so they can follow Taylor Swift. Grown adults who don't know how to cook proper meals and eat fast/convenience food for every meal should feel ashamed, even if they aren't. Some examples of the trend are conspicuous by their absence: it's interesting that Freddie brings up "adult men who proudly eat nothing but chicken nuggets and Kraft macaroni and cheese" and women wearing snuggies in public without once alluding to the body positivity/health at every size movement, even though it's a perfect example of the relaxing of standards across the board. (I mean, these people spent years complaining about the "toxic and unrealistic beauty standards" promulgated by the fashion industry and social media, and apparently succeeded in replacing them with - nothing.) But one of the specific examples he cites seems oddly in tension with the others:
Authenticity. Closely related to but distinct from selling out was the quest for authenticity - to live a life where the outside matches the inside, to embrace one’s own internal values and ethics in one’s outward behavior, to not try to appear to be anything other than what we truly were. The idea was that we have a true self, or at least true impulses, and we live better and more ethical lives when we allow them to dictate our acts and (especially) our self-expression. When I was in high school in the late 1990s, there was no insult more cutting than “poseur.” But then online life happened, and we were stuck in these various networks and mediums that were fully the product of choices we made, where how we appeared to others was in every sense orchestrated to some degree. Instagram is the notorious example; few of us actually live lives that are composed of nothing but tasteful minimalism, inspiring visuals, and enviable brunch spreads, but that’s how everybody started to present themselves. The idea of authenticity in such a context is rather ridiculous, and so most people let go of it, and now a younger generation has arrived that has no idea what the term could mean.
I agree with him that, in the modern Western world, there's no longer much of an expectation for people to live and present themselves "authentically" : among sufficiently online women, using Instagram filters on your selfies is the rule rather than the exception; cosmetic surgery (in both sexes) is more common than ever; the less said about LinkedIn, the better.
But it occurred to me: for all of the other examples of the trend towards relaxation of standards, isn't this precisely how the people engaging in these lifestyle choices would defend them? "I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin wearing a tie to the office - wearing a hoodie and sweatpants makes me feel more like myself." "I used to read boring grown-up books because that's what was expected of me and people would make fun of me for reading Harry Potter on the tube - I like that now I can read Harry Potter without shame." And so on.
What do you think?
Folamh3
1d ago
Frequently lifting heavy objects
You're telling me that the gym did this to me?
You're looking at this wrong. The policy isn't expected or intended primarily to pay for itself via fines. The policy is intended to pay for itself by deterring fare evaders from evading fares i.e. a visible police presence will encourage people to buy tickets who otherwise would not have bought them.
Let's take the middle of your cost estimate, $72m/year. Per the NYT, the typical New York subway fare is $2.90. To get a return on investment, in the course of a calendar year, 24,827,586 passengers who would otherwise have avoided paying the fare need to pay the fare. That works out at 68,021 passengers a day.
3.6 million people ride the NYC subway every day, of whom (again per NYT) 14% refuse to pay the fare - 504,000 people a day. If a visible police presence convinces 68,021 of those people (a mere 13.5% of the total number of daily fare evaders) to pay the fare, the policy has paid for itself. Sounds doable, frankly.
Using the lower bound of your cost estimate works out at 44,402 passengers a day (8.8% of people currently evading fares on the subway); the upper bound, 91,639 (18.2%). None of these sound like fantastical pie-in-the-sky figures: at most, you have to persuade a fifth of people currently jumping the turnstiles not to do so, and you're done. Anything above that is pure profit.
Folamh3
2d ago
Folamh3
2d ago
Also shave because asian women don’t like beards.
In my (not remotely limited) experience, this is not the case.
I hope you don't mind my asking - how did you get banned from Hinge?
Also, are contact lenses an option, rather than Lasik?
I got thinking about this when Richard Hanania pointed out that the political systems practised by Vietnam, Japan, Korea and China could hardly be more different from each other: China is nominally-communist-but-really-state-capitalist-and-authoritarian, Vietnam is actual no bullshit communist, Japan and Korea are modern capitalist societies. And yet, the day-to-day experiences of living in any of those countries are remarkably similar: low crime, low rates of children born out of wedlock (coupled with low fertility in general), high rates of educational attainment, high life expectancy. It suggests that, to the extent that your country following a particular political system makes a difference to the lived experience of its citizens at all, the difference is mainly felt on the margin. A particular political system can help to safeguard and maintain stability and economic productivity in a country, but you'll never establish a stable, functional and economically productive country without a critical mass of human capital, regardless of which political system it nominally follows. A corollary of this is that debating what political system your country should follow when it doesn't have the prerequisite human capital is like debating what colour to paint your car when it doesn't have an engine.
Folamh3
3d ago
Sorry to bring this up again, but I found another source, an article by @zackmdavis who used to post here and which contains some bangers:
To arbitrarily pick one exhibit, in April 2018, the /r/MtF subreddit, which then had over 28,000 subscribers, posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation 'fetish' (or similar) before you realized you were trans?". The results: 82% of over 2000 respondents said Yes.
The scientific literature says the same thing. Blanchard 1985: 73% of not exclusively androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (A lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-dressing, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes; Jack Molay coined the term crossdreaming, which seems more apt.) Lawrence 2005: of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. Smith et al. 2005: 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) Nuttbrock et al. 2011: lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association, says the same thing in its section on gender dysphoria:
In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. Early-onset gender dysphoria starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. Late-onset gender dysphoria occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.
Folamh3
3d ago
They wouldn't have to. In another comment I wrote:
My one-sentence gloss of liberalism is "do whatever you want as long you aren't infringing on anyone else's rights", which quickly spirals into endless debates about distributed effects and externalities and "but how does this affect you personally" and so on.
It's perfectly consistent of Locke to think "what some other person believes about the ontological character of the communion wafer does not affect you personally, so let them do as they please; but the normalisation of sodomy, adultery and promiscuity absolutely do have distributed negative effects on society, and so should be forbidden and socially stigmatised". Whereas a more modern liberal generally takes the attitude of "people are entitled to their own opinions" and "what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is none of the government's business, and by extension none of society's business".
I don't have a good answer as to which interpretation of liberalism is better or more conducive to human flourishing. "As long as you aren't infringing on anyone else's rights" permits a lot of degrees of freedom to permit certain things and forbid others.
Folamh3
3d ago
I reflexively block all women on social media
I feel this could do with some elaboration.
Folamh3
4d ago
Breaking news, there was a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin.
It seems the shooter is a fifteen-year-old female (as in female female) who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I first heard about this because of a meme I saw referring to unconfirmed reports claiming that the shooter had written up a manifesto concerning her motivations on Google Docs, but neglected to make the document public before going on her rampage.
Well, it's rather pointless trying to discuss the merits of a particular work of art with someone who hasn't experienced it, surely.
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