ZanarkandAbesFan
No bio...
User ID: 2935
I think it's a perfectly coherent view - the point is that she (Sanchez) is condemning herself (and in a small way all women) to infantilisation.
I don't think there are many commonly used modern definition of feminism that directly involve policing other women's choices regarding their own appearances. I'd be surprised if Tina Brown has explicitly endorsed this principle.
In any case, this would be slightly more believable if the author had exhibited anything but total contempt for Laura Sanchez. I find it hard to believe Tina Brown is genuinely concerned about Sanchez's wellbeing.
Back to Tina's commentary:
Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.
Ouch.
This Tina Brown seems awfully bitter and judgemental about another woman's appearance for a supposed feminist. I wonder what her problem is.
ZanarkandAbesFan
7d ago
I think a lot of the bias in the pro-Muslim direction is a lack of lived experience with this stuff.
That probably applies to zoomers, but I don't think it explains why the progressive movement (which is dominated by millenials) axiomatically favours Muslims over Jews. I'm pretty sure AOC remembers 9/11.
ZanarkandAbesFan
7d ago
they won't survive when the blue-hairs start being elected to the senate.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. The senate has a conservative bias - I don't see them electing many blue-haired types in the foreseeable future. I agree that this is probably the friendliest administration Israel is going to have for a while but there's probably a lower limit on how strained the relationship is going to get. Unlike almost everyone else in the region, Israel is an actually useful country that's 90% geopolitically aligned with the US in its goals. What's the alternative to being allied with them?
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine.
I assume it's the media environment. Most legacy media is run by progressives, who will side with Muslims against Jews in any conflict, while newer media is either permeated with anti-western propaganda like TikTok or has no guardrails against plain old standard anti-semitic crankery like Twitter.
I lived in Israel in 2019, and as far as I could see, it was a country that would be worth preserving.
I genuinely hope to see you write more about this at some point.
I'm definitely much more liberal than a lot of people here, but this is one thing I just cannot stomach from my own tribe.
Agreed. I'm also more liberal than not (pro-choice, mostly pro-trans, etc) but it seems clear that liberalism as a movement has, IMO, ceded leadership almost entirely to people who don't believe in universalist principles or rights but rather have a strictly hierarchical view of the world (the infamous "progressive stack") where Jews/whites inhabit the bottom rung and black people/muslims are at the top.
ZanarkandAbesFan
8d ago
Watching the DR apply the same "America worst" logic formerly typically used by the antiwar left is certainly amusing.
The woke right strikes again.
The pro-Ukraine, anti-Israel crowd is not small. It's the default position of the western left.
ZanarkandAbesFan
16d ago
A perfect representation of what it means to be "Woke right". Daydreaming about an abusive relationship with a regime that isn't shy about how much it despises you just for the sake of killing the Jews.
ZanarkandAbesFan
17d ago
Do Hezbollah and the Houthis also do this?
ZanarkandAbesFan
24d ago
ZanarkandAbesFan
24d ago
America, by contrast, is attempting something unprecedented in history: to maintain national coherence while undergoing massive demographic transformation without any clear cultural center holding it all together. How much change can a country absorb before it becomes something else entirely? And does that change matter? It’s not that immigrants are bad or incapable. That’s not the point. The point is that America is trying to do something historically novel: become a post-ethnic, post-historical nation that binds together people with radically different origins, languages, and values using only a kind of civic glue—and lately, even that glue seems to be dissolving.
Laughs in European.
ZanarkandAbesFan
25d ago
I wonder if they're getting any takers.
ZanarkandAbesFan
28d ago
It isn't surprising that the anglosphere right has greater problems attracting young people than the right in the rest of the west. AfD, Sweden democrats and national rally do fairly well among young voters. The rather aimless right in the anglosphere fails at attracting young people and successful people. A young highly educated person is simply going to find the aesthetics and the values of mainstream conservatism boring and unappealing.
Why the anti-immigration right tends to do better in non-anglosphere than anglosphere countries has a lot to do with the differing electoral systems. The main center-right party in Sweden, the Moderates, isn't much sexier than the UK Conservatives but because Sweden uses proportional representation (as opposed to FPTP) a vote for SD isn't going to risk feeling wasted like a vote for Reform in the UK might.
ZanarkandAbesFan
30d ago
They've got my vote (/s, I love the Asian hoes)
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Makes me wonder what Fatah stands for.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
And it's all in service of making them pass better as the opposite sex as an adult when I don't even agree that that's a valid goal for anyone to undertake.
Well this is the actual crux of our disagreement, in that I believe that physical transition can be a helpful approach for a certain small number of people. Everything else you've brought up is downstream of that - i.e. I can't imagine you'd be particularly animated about potential side effects like infertility if we were discussing some other procedure designed to achieve what you'd consider a valid outcome.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
They aren't harmless.
I didn't say they were.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I assume what you mean is that puberty blockers are more of a deviation from the standard path of physical development than going through puberty itself is (I'd be quite confused otherwise; it's hard to think of any process or operation that actually causes more changes to the human body than puberty).
I'm not really clued into the exact nature of the side effects of puberty blockers, but that doesn't change my argument. It's up to the clinician to weigh the harms of putting a child on puberty blockers vs the potential benefit to their future mental wellbeing of potentially allowing them to transition more effectively.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
and sounding like the penultimate act of The Feminist.
God that's a weird read.
...and the puberty blocker discussion in particular was very vexing to me. I just genuinely don't know how anyone can be okay with the idea, especially now that we know way more about it than we did 10 years ago.
I'm basically pro-puberty blocker in principle, and my reasoning is as follows:
-
Adults should, broadly speaking, be allowed to make their own decisions regarding their bodies, including physically transitioning.
-
Whether a trans person begins to physical transition before or after adolescense seems to have a big effect on how effectively they'll eventually pass as the opposite sex.
-
I'm quite uncomfortable with non-adults making permanent, irreversible alterations to their body.
-
Therefore, if someone has made clear they want to transition and there's a way for someone to reach adulthood (or get closer to it) while preserving the best chance of passing as the opposite sex, I would be in favour of it. Puberty blockers seem to be a reasonable solution to this problem.
In practice of course things quickly get messy and I don't know what the ideal criteria should be for getting blockers prescribed nor what the trade-off is between possible side-effects and potential benefit. I leave that to people more invested in the topic.
I interpreted @Goodguy's comment to mean that someone arguing for reducing women's liberties for the sake of improving their own dating prospects is loser-coded. Caesar and Augustus probably had more conservative sexual ethics than most western people do today, but I imagine that was for reasons other than worrying that they'd lose out to chad if women could choose their own suitors.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I doubt Caesar would have feared competing in a free sexual marketplace.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I don't see what's so outrageous about the post you replied to that you'd assume trolling. Maybe saying Finn and Niko are top percentile is hyperbole, but not crazily so.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Casual sex is a luxury. And that's been true for the entirety of human history. Short of prostitution, courting a partner/paying the bride price was the only way to get your willie wet for the overwhelming majority of men.
I'd have assumed most men throughout history have had access to prostitutes.
I understand that all that could apply in theory, but I'm quite sceptical that it explains this writer's behaviour. To be fair to Brown, I'm not actually sure she's publicly aligned herself with one particular form of feminism, but the usual way feminism is expressed by popular figures in the modern world always seems to include some form of "women should be empowered to do/look/behave as they want", so I - perhaps mistakenly - assume that position unless stated otherwise. My sense is that other schools of thought are much more niche and/or dated.
In any case though, the main reason I don't buy it here is the particularly personal way she wrote that passage about Sanchez - her description is pointlessly nasty and seem to come from a place of bitterness rather than of sober reflection. Less like some form of "what she's done to her appearance has negative implications about how women are expected to look to appeal to a man" and more like "I'm angry that a wealthy man would choose a stupid ugly bitch like her".
More options
Context Copy link