Tree
6d ago
I didn’t say that. Also don’t simultaneously doubt my word on what studies say and preemptively dismiss them. You have insulated your position from evidence. You are hostile even though our object-level positions aren't far apart. Your comments are terrible and you should feel bad.
Tree
6d ago
I just presented the statistics, I even said I am sympathetic to the 'henpecked husband' trope. I need more than your naked assertion of governmental lying to dismiss studies, even and especially those I would like to dismiss.
Tree
6d ago
It's negative. The happiest group is married with children, the unhappiest unmarried with children. Also known as "the people who have their shit together" and "the people who don't have their shit together".
Anyway, because of this, the correlation between marriage and happiness is way stronger than between children and happiness. So if I'm conflating two things, it's not to the advantage of your 'shrieking harpy' argument.
Tree
6d ago
What do you say to all the studies which find correlation between marriage/children and reported happiness?
Full disclosure: I sometimes argue against them, eg by pointing out that happy people are more likely to get married. But from an opposite perspective to yours: I think men in traditional marriage are, not oppressed, exactly, but too often treated like beasts of burden, expected to do unpleasant work and provide money to women and children, without a right to expect anything in return.
Tree
6d ago
What is surprising about that chart? What did you expect? Obviously the transfers benefitting the poor come from the rich. People have been voting for this for the last century, and will keep voting for it. The state's share of the economy will keep growing, first to european levels, then beyond. And it doesn't matter to people how rich in absolute terms "the poor" are, or how much wealth gets destroyed in the process. I find the impulse difficult to understand, perhaps an extreme rawlsian risk aversion (like an insurance against relative poverty) coupled with the egalitarian ideal of equal social status leading to a demand of equal income.
Tree
7d ago
Not to mention it’s extremely stressful and labor-intensive on the parents. And given that the evidence on the kid’s future well-being is inconclusive, that is the main thing.
They’re doing liberalism wrong. Liberalism is rooted in a profound lazyness. ‘laissez faire’, let [things] do, let it be. It’s like old hippies ‘free range’ education, not this micromanaging shit.
Tree
7d ago
Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness?
Of course. Unlike other women, you are aware of the patriarchy and rape culture and the myriad ways in which they threaten and coerce and pressure and nudge an entire sex into sex. Is it surprising that a strong perceptive woman unafraid to stand up for herself would run afoul of the meek sexual object role the patriarchy assigned to her?
Tree
8d ago
The last big decriminalization push was in the 80’s, so I presume you’re old. You’ve monitored your male friendships for intimacy and noticed a statistically significant change, based on a cutoff point like this, bearing in mind that friendships in later life are often less intense?
Excuse my skepticism. It’s just that until a few years ago, no one had heard of this theory, and now it’s seemingly so obvious it has seeped into people’s bones.
To me this argument looks like a recent product of cross-pollination between anti-woke strands, in this case manosphere + trad. Until the 2010s, imo it would have been shameful and somewhat ‘gay’ to even care about male intimacy. By that I don’t mean to say that the argument is wrong, just that it was not and still is not obvious .
I don't want to lead them on any more than I would want to lead on a female friend.
The true analogy would be leading on, a gay friend. There is no ‘leading on’ a straight man.
Tree
8d ago
Also no. I'm sorry, what are you guys feeling in your bones? That pride parades have fundamentally changed how you relate to other heterosexual men?
Tree
9d ago
Not to be all atheist, but one of the things I find most discrediting to the Church’s claim of providing moral guidance was its shameful compromising with hitler. Even though it was clear to church leaders that nazism was both generally evil, and opposed to the power of the church as such. Unlike the german people, who were more bribed than threatened into compliance with the regime (so can be said to be morally corrupted, and complicit), the church’s behaviour reflects pure moral cowardice.
Tree
10d ago
At least with hitler, as long as you weren’t… a jew, a slav, a jehovah’s witness, a political opponent, a homosexual, a cripple… you were sort of safe cravenly heil hitlering your way though the war-torn hellscape. Whereas for the khmer rouge, the entire present population was fair game. It was all about the future. And if the present clay wasn’t molding fast enough into the ‘new man’, throw it away and try again, as many times as it takes. They went beyond identity politics, there was no ingroup left.
My eye does twitch involuntarily when people say genghis khan's empire 'opened up trade lanes' and 'travelers had never been so safe'.
I don’t believe in the hierarchy of motives. If you had offered to take the ‘undesirables’ off hitler’s hands, he would have happily agreed, just like the communist only wants successful reeducation for capitalists. The deciding moment comes after the original optimistic plan fails. You can then either give up on the idea, or find that you “have to” apply more force for reeducation than you thought, and so tragically break a few eggs in the process/ murder everyone out of convenience. The relevant moral lines are broken here, not on the higher level of goals.
Tree
12d ago
Homosexuality is legal in dagestan.
Anyway, I don’t see why women would be any less icked by a photo like that in some repressive country, than by two western male friends touching that they don’t know about. The respective legal situation determines the ick?
Tree
12d ago
Is not saying something a lie? For example, if I notice that my friend has gained some weight, but I don't tell him so, am I lying to him?
Does he care about his weight, and mistakenly believes it has remained unchanged? If so, silence would be agreement, and so, a lie.
Is not giving your opinion a lie? For example, if someone proudly shows me his new car and I tell him without prompting that it's ugly, a purely subjective judgement, have I given him valuable information or have I insulted him unasked?
Such a conversation often includes the words ‘do you like my new car?’, that is a prompt , and you have to say it’s ugly. How does the conversation go with you? He shows you the car, says ‘it’s soooo beautiful!’ and you go ‘yes, I too find it wonderful’ (no you don’t, it’s fuckugly, that’s a lie).
Do you think there is any difference between stating something unflattering, and conveying that information to them in a way that allows them to save face?
Yes, but I don’t like it much, it’s a compromise required by human weakness. Ideally, honesty should always be forgiven.
The ‘saving face’ problem is that the conveying of information has been sullied by social status games. Some bits of information, criticism, are viewed as little arrows harming a person’s status. That is not conductive to a clear view of the world.
What are your lovingly constructed delusions? Tell me if I should lie to protect them, and I will.
For example, I believe that this is largely a lie lonely people tell themselves, as I did once upon a time.
I think your view is unfalsifiable. What if I produced a happy hermit? What if I told you I have experienced far more moments of happiness alone than in social settings?
What is modern atomization? To a large degree, people with alternatives, choosing to be alone. They could talk to their parents every day. They could go through their contacts or facebook friends and do something with a friend every day. But they choose not to. As to what little they do do, there were essentially no negative psychological consequences from covid, even though the threat and lockdowns stopped most social contact for a time.
I believe the same is true of our social lives.
So many things are the most important thing in life?
Tree
12d ago
Humans are social animals
To a degree. To what degree, largely up to us. Like our mating behaviours are somewhere between the lifelong monogamy of some birds and the 50-women harem season of elephant seals.
Lying is acceptable if the liee wants to be lied to, but I don’t think most people agree to be lied to. Do you ? I certainly don’t. They, like me, believe their model of the world is sound, tested, and that the truth flows into it without obstruction. They trust that their belief that they are smart and thin is actually true, instead of being artificially maintained and protected by social lies. Far from getting pleasure from ‘insulting’ them, I think I’m doing them a favour at personal cost, because some will shoot the messenger.
Tree
12d ago
What good is niceness alone on an island? Social credit is scrip, only useful for doing social things. There is value outside of the social sphere. Within it, I fundamentally disagree that you should not tell fat stupid irrational friends that they’re fat stupid and irrational, ie I disagree that lies are necessary to live in society.
Tree
12d ago
Bu the ick is a 5D figment of their imagination in this case; and you’re denying it adamantly. No one is getting kissed or propositioned. Indulging a friend’s false, irrational fear to the point of sacrificing intimate friendships is a massive society-wide overreaction, if that is what is happening. It's silly. What if he thinks I'm a crocodile, so I can't eat in his presence?
And the need to not signal homosexuality is infinitely stronger when it comes to women, if for different but much more obvious reasons.
Really? It seems weaker. Criminally, lesbianism has always been far less punished, for example. Oh, you mean signaling male homosexuality to women? I can see why that would be worse. But again it's false in this case. Why indulge their unfounded accusations of dishonesty? Fuck'em if they can't take a joke.
Tree
12d ago
I'm not accusing you of homophobia or any other phobia, it's just that I don't see more to this theory than correlation: yes, gay pride parades are correlated with a decline in male intimate friendships. Tornado damage also increased.
The mechanism making it a causal relationship doesn't work. why do I care that my friend could think that I'm a closeted homosexual when I'm clearly not ? A closeted homosexual can perfectly provide all the duties of a friend - he would be a bad husband, but that's not the friend's problem.
Tree
12d ago
But you know your friends, you don't have to worry about ambigous signals, like with a girl you like. He knows you're not gay, you know he's not gay, "not that there's anything wrong with that", so what is this fear? It seems paranoid. And somehow, if we recriminalized homosexuality, and then we found ourselves in a situation that resembled homosexuality, so objectively our situation would be more dangerous, that's when we could relax? It's very strange, counter-intuitive reasoning.
Tree
12d ago
It’s a strange story that doesn’t make all that much sense. Why do we care? Why can’t we be close friends anyway? I mean, I’m not too worried about :
-
appearing gay even though I’m not
-
turning gay by closeness with a male friend, and
-
even if I could somehow turn gay like a frog, it wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world. It has few costs and some advantages.
Also, you would expect that in a society with open accepted homosexuality, there would be less people in the closet. So the straights are far more likely to actually be straights than they used to be, and there should be less need to prove straightness.
Random other theories to explain the relative lack of intimate male friendships:
-
general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult
-
male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society
-
female homophobia
Tree
12d ago
A higher price of entry always gives you an even higher quality pool of people. No one should be allowed to serve coffee unless they can pay the million dollar licensing fee.
The argument is wrong on multiple levels. It confuses filtering with cleaning. In effect you’re corraling the most crime-prone elements towards criminality. They could be braiding hair, but thanks to the license requirement, you got them selling drugs and robbing people. As to the law-abiding people, they lose the licensing cost, often years of their lives. The costs are massive and unquestionable, the benefits are extremely dubious. In exchange for 4% of the lives of every citizen, we receive at best a ~ 1% cost increase for criminal organizations.
Tree
12d ago
If you're at home and you stub your toe and say fuck, is that considered unprofessional? Are people supposed to act 'professional' in every part of their lives?
Tree
13d ago
I’m not sure a myth from greek antiquity is a good example of medieval sexual mores.
Among the accusations that got the templars burned, aside from sorcery, and spitting on the cross, was sodomy. The evidence, their sigil: two men on a horse. When not under torture, they maintained it represented poverty, not buttfucking. Alas, that’s recantation, and the penalty, carbonization.
Deep in the forests of central europe, above the village my family hails from, there is a castle on a hill, built by a family whose last scion was burned at the stake for sodomy in the 15th century. The documents of his trial make for interesting reading. He was a minor noble, but still relatively rich and well-connected. He would have sex with a male servant or commoner and pay for it in expensive dresses and money, then they would try to blackmail him for more, and when the demands became too pressing, he would move on to another city. This only worked a few times and didn’t end well. So fucking dudes was a thing, but a very expensive and dangerous thing.
The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.
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