Its frankly hilarious to me that the Dems are basically stuck with the coalition they built and all its dysfunction because they elevated the AOCs, Kamala Harris', Jasmine Crocketts and Stacey Abrams amongst them, and the most motivated and active parts of their base are all-in on identity politics, so trying to wrest back the controls will require exercises of raw, naked power that is just as likely to bite them in the ass as it is to select a viable candidate.
My biggest fear for the GOP is post-Trump (or the small chance Trump simply declines to leave the stage) power struggles and the constant tendency at infighting at the most inopportune times.
But the GOP now has a deep qualified leadership bench by comparison, and one that isn't (as far as I can tell) beholden to constituencies that will demand the faucet of grift, graft and fraud be kept all the way open or they'll revolt. Which is to say, a GOP official can actually try things that might make things better.
it is quite clear that as of now the USA is in no position to contest the globe with the likes of China or Russia.
...
...I don't think it is 'quite clear' and the case laid out here just takes it for granted.
I'm sorry was there not a whole thing where Russian and Chinese anti-air completely failed to pose a real threat in Venezuela and later in Iran?
Did I hallucinate a whole news story about an incursion into Venezuela without even needing to perform a significant amount of bombing? Last I checked Maduro is still in prison in New York.
Was that not a notable development that suggests that U.S. air superiority is even more lopsided than might have been assumed?
I'm actually asking for a chain of reasoning to explain how you came out of the last 5 months with a higher estimate of Russian and Chinese military efficacy compared to the U.S. than previously. This viewpoint befuddles me.
I don't know what your precise definition of "contest the globe" is but holy cow, if nukes were off the table, how exactly do those countries even show up for the competition, let alone win it convincingly. What exactly is the edge you're giving to them that will outperform demonstrated U.S. capabilities, before discussing the stuff that is as-yet undemonstrated.
Find it annoying to see these posts that basically affirming the consequent by bolstering a given conclusion they've reached (the U.S. failed to completely demolish Iran's nuclear program) then pretending their premise (U.S. military might capacity is hamstrung under Donald Trump) without a supporting scaffold of logic. We're barely two years into Trump two, after four years of whatever the hell Biden was, and making bold prognostications about his efforts being failures kind of belies the results we've seen overall.
which’ll hopefully initiate a process of rebuilding for the damages the last decade of Trumpist politics have inflicted on the nation.
Can't help but notice some motivated reasoning there, bub. Especially because there's that glaring interruption in "the last decade" of Trumpist politics that goes utterly glossed over.
Curious to mention Kamala in your post but I do a ctrl+f "Biden" and its empty. Howboutdat.
Anyway, sorry to sound flippant, but it really helps that when you're trying to advance a particular conclusion, you actually back up the premises you're using that are the most controversial or extraordinary, such as "a decade of damages" from Trumpist politics (damage inflicted where? of what magnitude?), or "...that his rule has largely been to the detriment of... America’s relationship with its allies in NATO" (As compared to before? What precisely has deteriorated?).
Anyhow:
Rubio or Vance remain the favorites for winning the 2028 Presidential election Much can change in between, but the assumption that there isn't a viable path forward that actually preserves much of the Trump coalition seems wishful, there's likely a power struggle to come, but all those Trump-backed challengers just blew out a bunch of incumbents in Indiana, so it seems pretty clear where the center of gravity within the GOP lies right now.
Oh, also, on the manufacturing front. Upward momentum after decades of decline... suggests something has changed or improved. Yes, that includes the Rust Belt.
I dunno, this analysis seems to be a little undercooked.
Tend to agree that 4 was the one where everything they'd learned came together and had the fewest annoyances overall.
And it achieved strong variety of gameplay and challenges, and the open world and fetch quests didn't feel too tedious 90% of the time.
Indeed, can't think of any part of it I genuinely dislike, other than the radio host guy, and mostly because of how repetitive he was.
I'm still desperate for a Far Cry 2 remake that adds more combat variety, and some of the quality of life upgrades from the subsequent entries, but keeps the core, raw immersive difficulty elements.
FC2 remains one of the few games I've ever played that balances out the "One Man Army" power fantasy with the "actually you can very easily die because you are all alone, in a hostile environment, with crappy weapons/tools and aggressively outnumbered by people who want you dead." Which is to say, it natively encouraged 'sensible' strategic and tactical approaches and punished you if you got too wild. At least, outside of explicit survival/horror games.
Also remains the best AI enemies ever had in the series... and in almost any other game I've ever played.
I have a distinct memory of aggroing a small group of enemies at an encampment by a river. I shelter in a small shack, firing out the windows. The enemies actually started flanking my position and then, to my absolute shock, lobbed a grenade right through the window practically into my lap. That was a tactic I would attribute to a human player. And I still rarely see that done by AI in even more modern games.
They were trying to flush me out of cover so they could mow me down.
Also the only game I know of where injuring an enemy and waiting for a comrade to come and rescue him so you can kill both was a viable tactic!
faceh
5d ago
I think there's a probable link between early sexual activity (esp. the coerced or semi-coerced sort) and later BDSM proclivities. It might impact the extremity to which they'll ultimately go.
But the flip side is, well, a lot of really normal women were happy to watch Fifty Shades.
Funny anectdote on that. In the original Red, Blue, and Yellow games the early version of Effort values meant if you leveled up your Pokemon the standard way, just constant battles, its 'under the hood' stats would actually be higher than if you cheated it with rare candies to reach level 100. I chose to level my favorites by grinding the Elite 4 and Cerulean cave.
So one time I battled my cousin using the Gameboy link cable (how's that for old school) and his team of straight level 100 'mon, and me, my strongest being a level 98 Mewtwo, and it turned into a surprise stomp in my favor, although it did come down to both of our Mewtwos in a slapfight to end it. I had NO CLUE about the hidden stats, I just chose to believe that because I had raised my pokemon with more care and attention as opposed to just pumping them with chemicals, they wanted to fight harder.
So the lesson is that yeah, sometimes pure effort does win over mere pedigree and performance enhancing drugs.
faceh
6d ago
My unfortunate anecdotal observation is that couples who do take BDSM practice 'seriously' are often harboring deeper mental scars or issues that they've convinced themselves are just kinky preferences and that can be managed within their structured (or not so structured) relationship.
In the worst cases (by no means the majority!) its all codependency, where "I need to hurt somebody to get out my latent aggression" meets "I need to be hurt as punishment for my shame" and neither is addressing the cause of the latent aggression or the source of the internalized shame.
The sexual release part might be over-emphasized, indeed, because all the complicated rules around consent, exchange of power, following protocols, maintaining rigid roles... that requires an emotionally stable person to maintain long term. Whereas many participants seem to just be chasing the fleeting dopamine high. And many many people who stumble into BDSM (especially with the mainstreaming of it post-Fifty Shades) are emotionally broken people who think they've found a way to make their own mental struggles somebody else's' responsibility.
I suspect once again that its something that can be practiced within a standard marital relationship... if the marriage is in fact the foundation of it, and they're not trying to cludge things together by accepting certain aspects of trad marriage but avoiding the parts that actually require emotional effort... and neglect the optimizations for having kids.
Anyhow, there's probably something to your point:
If feminists want to backdoor in the patriarchy without admitting the trads were right or that they've been led astray, then just let things evolve to Gorean standards but make it clear "its all consent and everyone can opt out if they want" and 'letting' the men keep 'slaves' and make the important decisions but really its all about the fulfillment of womens' need for release of control, and the women in fact DEMANDED this release from a position of power." No oppression here! Just everyone letting their freak flag fly!
But man, the idea of keeping some sizeable portion of the female population as, effectively, "pets" as you indicate seems really tiring to me. Its not what my dream for society is, despite what some may think based on my overall position on the gender wars. The fact that women may have an occasional innate desire to submit to higher powers is, in my view, simply not something to build an entire society around. That also includes the part of that desire that makes them seek out the highest-power male in the vicinity and compete for his attention. NOT a good organizing principle for civilization.
Ultimately, the solution will involved de-centering women and their desires/demands in favor of longer-term goals... and THAT is what they simply will not abide.
faceh
6d ago
That's probably a part of it.
There was an element of inflated expectations that kids in my generation grew up with. I get the sense that Gen Z does NOT have such a core belief of "I am a being of unlimited potential I just have to choose my goal and work at it!" So they're more nihilist, whereas a lot of millenials had to learn some hard lessons about their own
I, personally internalized something like The Mewtwo Lesson. But it turns out that the "circumstances of one's birth" are pretty damn relevant to your long term outcomes, and you can either lean into your existing strengths or you'll inherently underperform and end up fighting twice as hard for half the success. And that's assuming nobody has actually stacked the deck against you.
Cold meritocracy pokes through either way. We have more ways to make people's skill differentials apparent than ever before.
Yep.
As an Elder Millenial I can recall the colorblind world that the Gen Xers were trying to create being very close to fruition...
But the snag came because disparate outcomes were inevitable. Once you'd done everything you can to level playing fields and boost disadvantaged players, the remaining disparities are probably intractable. Whatever reasons you think cause that, its still resulting in one group seeing better performance, better outcomes on average, and your other group is still lagging and you've already skimmed the cream of the crop.
And if you sneak in an assumption that equal outcomes is the true goal, this can't be allowed to stand.
I've lived through both the realization that the actual goal was to ensure equality of outcomes, and the increasing ham-handed efforts to achieve such a goal...
AND the ultimate realization that to make things equal, they have to actively disadvantage people who would otherwise find success and contribute more to society, and they feel this disadvantaging is morally justified and right.
Even as this gnaws at the load-bearing infrastructure of your civilization in more ways than one. The colorblind world was probably possible, but it was an unstable equilibrium that required us to be okay with some groups just continuing to 'win' fair contests and certain groups hitting a ceiling that we can't guide them past.
faceh
9d ago
It is my opinion that any maintenance work that requires much spatial reasoning and physical/brute force to complete is just far more efficiently done by a male than a female of 'equal' training.
I have watched women try to change a tire. While I don't doubt many could be trained up to complete the work 'quickly' with the proper tools... the steps required to jack the car up, force over-tightened nuts, remove the old tire and position the new one, and then physically tighten the nuts sufficiently, in the proper order, are easily done twice as fast by a dude with median male physical capabilities.
There's that famous examination of grip strength where only the very strongest females are actually able to compete with the overall weakest males.
The average guy in his 70's is stronger than most women in their 20's. The gap is absurd.
Its not hard to extrapolate from there that most women won't be suited for most physical tasks that the average dude completes.
faceh
10d ago
I don't think they are.
Everything is interconnected and degradation in one part of the system will propagate.
You can get that 25% of men to do the core, indispensable jobs but there's still so much infrastructure built on top of that which needs maintenance.
Something is likely to give.
faceh
12d ago
very few jobs these days really require raw strength.
This seems obscenely optimistic.
Even driving an Amazon truck will require some amount of raw strength on occasion.
Moving furniture around the house, let alone between houses.
Trimming trees, installing windows, changing tires, just dozens of systems where physical strength is a massive bonus when interacting with them.
Just because most humans aren't working on farms these days doesn't mean there are a ton of jobs which demand the physical strength, which we all pretty much rely on.
faceh
12d ago
Until we have robots that can build other robots, this is all still founded on the need for some core of strong physical laborers who can boostrap the rest.
And the powered exoskeletons we do have (forklifts, earth movers, cranes, etc.) are still overwhelmingly operated by males.
And finally, in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, when electricity and fuel are hard to come by, humans with physical strength are an absolutely critical resource to kickstarting rescue and recovery efforts.
faceh
13d ago
That's closer to how I'd model it.
A hot, high status guy looking to get his rocks off can find a naive but physically attractive woman with self-esteem issues, and use his talents honed on much more selective girls to gas her up enough to bang him with relative ease. But the sheer truth of it is that being seen with her would detract from his status (and hurt his odds with the more selective girls) so its a bare, unvarnished fact of the universe that he will absolutely NEVER advance a relationship with her.
In a world where physical altercation isn't allowed, the girl's male family, and her other potential suitors, cannot actually slap the shit out of an interloper to discourage this. So males that can flex pure status and high verbal IQ have no real risk here, they don't have to fight their competition like deers locking antlers.
So I'd say the male-male competition aspect is narrowed by the fact that the only two factors you're allowed to compete on are pure attractiveness + status. The real challenge for getting laid is overcome the lady's defenses.
I mean, we could probably take a look at the economic productivity of given nations who lost some significant portion of their male population in a short period of time.
Like, say, after a war.
We usually do indeed see the female population shift in to cover some of the shortfall.
Somehow I doubt that shift actually covered all the missing labor, and more likely certain less critical services were left to languish in the meantime.
More likely, I'd expect the aforementioned wage premium for strong laborers to encourage men to do more work so as to make up some of the difference.
As I said, I suspect there's a baseline hard laborer requirement needed to maintain the workings of civilizations, and as long as a society is barely above that line it can keep advancing.
I do not know where that baseline would be. I honestly do not want to find out.
faceh
13d ago
So we're taking an efficiency/productivity hit since now entire industries has to be designed around standards based on what slightly above-average women/teams of women can do.
And we can expect a much higher injury rate which means more downtime, and higher medical costs to boot.
Women are just not outfitted for heavy, repetitive labor.
Although this also means exceptionally strong laborers will command quite a premium.
faceh
13d ago
I appreciate that you're bringing some actual data and nuance.
But its still slamming headfirst into the reports that half of young men just... aren't dating.
And that the average # of sexual partners reported by females (prior to marriage) has climbed over decades... even as marriage rates fall. Women are clearly having more sex with a variety of men.
This can still all track if the average man is having more sex than they used to. But that doesn't appear in any data, although we can see signs that some small subset of men are getting laid a ton. Women are not having sex with a random selection of the male population. There's a lot of overlap in who they're having sex with.
Whether this rises to an 80/20 ratio is debatable, but I don't think you can look at one of those guys in the 50% of non-daters and say with a straight face "statistically, you're having sex somewhat regularly."
faceh
13d ago
Scroll to the actual list of occupations under that category.
It includes, non-exhaustively:
- Automotive service technicians and mechanics
- Construction laborers
- Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators
- Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
- Refuse and recyclable material collectors
- Industrial machinery mechanics
The categorization is due to the fact that those jobs would "occasionally" require lifting of "26–50 pounds".
Whereas in order to classify as 'light' work, it never requires lifting that much.
I don't think I'd want to implement this sort of move unless we had our robot factories up and running.
Maintenance of advanced civilization requires a lot of back-breaking work, constantly, day in and day out.
Fixing roads, disposing of waste, farming, butchering, building construction, fixing cars and heavy machinery, fighting fires, and running and maintaining electrical wires (lowkey, the most important one is that last one).
These needs spike in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. Natural disasters are not a solved problem.
There's going to be some baseline need for physically strong laborers just to maintain what we have, let alone push us forward.
Here's interesting stats I didn't know existed before:
"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."
It looks like "Medium Strength" occupations and above are the ones that really need male capabilities. So we're sitting at around 40% of jobs that will need males to fill them, on the physical side. Then some overage of that for the mentally demanding stuff too.
Not a lot of headroom to start reducing the male ratio below 50%.
"Oh but we can outsource a lot of our industry/labor intensive work."
That just shifts the problems elsewhere, not eliminates them. We already do that in the U.S., and there's still 35+% of jobs that need upper body strength to perform effectively. China did its one child policy and now has an excessive number of males... which we get a benefit from by buying their labor at a discount.
That can't last.
Historically, I think the actual solution was always to create 'tiers' of males. In short, expendables and non-expendables.
So you have one class that is basically or literally enslaved, and was expected to die early after a hard, miserable life. That would reproduce only at the will of their betters to ensure a consistent supply of such labor to maintain the lifestyles of the rest.
Then the upper class, where the male-female ratio WAS much more favorable to those males.
That 'solves' your problem of needing males to do the work that upholds society, whilst also keeping the 'problem' males on a short leash, and giving the upper-class males a favorable gender ratio.
simultaneously believing that Donald Trump needs to be assassinated and that it's a shame all these courageous shooters keep missing, and also that they are all hoaxes and staged by the evil Orange Man to raise his political capital and make them look bad.
Its even a bit worse than that, the logic they're apparently using.
23k upvotes on the suggestion that it is highly suspicious that a shooter showed up to the one Correspondent's dinner Trump has attended in years. Of course the original twitter post has 250k likes so its even worse there.
Which, you know, Occam's razor would say that a shooter who wanted Trump dead would NOT show up to a Correspondent's dinner where he wasn't attending, but surely might show up if Trump was there and this was the best opening. It is not odd that these two things were correlated.
Disclaimer: Reddit it is astroturfed to all hell, so I can't even be sure this is an organic depiction of Redditors' views, but the fact that the echo chamber will defend both the need to kill him AND write off failed attempts as false flags shows serious epistemic collapse.
faceh
15d ago
Its mildly amusing how the reddit left doesn't want to claim this particular guy, but they do want to praise the idea of killing Trump, so they can't reject him either.
So they keep getting incompetent, uncharismatic assassins making poorly-timed (politically speaking) doomed attempts and getting embarrassingly thwarted.
Which ends up running against their interests, since we see the various MAGA factions set aside their differences and gift Trump substantial political capital that he didn't even have to work for.
And I'm not making a galaxy-brained argument that its good for Trump that people keep trying to kill him. I am saying that he is pretty good at spinning such failed attempts into favorable results. Its pretty freakin' fair to say the Butler attempt, and his immediate reaction, contributed to his later win.
But they can't bring themselves to say "STOP trying to kill the guy, you're not going to succeed, its bad optics, and he'll use it to advance his own goals." Because they presumably do wish one of them gets lucky.
And yeah, imagine they 'get lucky' and take out Trump at the perfect time to ensure the GOP sweeps 2028 and Vance has a mandate to root out the domestic terrorists who offed the beloved orange man.
Dear lord.
I just really don't want to share a country with these people.
Like, he's getting the barest of points for intentionally targeting the officials he actually has a beef with, and not people tangentially connected with their policies.
But as the central justification for the action:
I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.
Really. Gonna go with the most spurious of the allegations rather than something particularly concrete about his policies or the negative impact you think they've had on actual individuals. Didn't even tack "Nazi" on the end there.
I genuinely consider armed rebellion a feature of our political system, so hey, a guy wants to grab a gun and make a run at a politician, its not my preference and I'd advise against it, but I won't say its morally wrong. But I can't support it when someone goes off on such an adventure with such a limited casus belli and even more limited idea of how offing his target(s) would improve the situation as stated.
I dunno man. I can imagine a list of specific grievances you could attach to Trump and this administration that would create a tangible justification for offing them. I would probably disagree with most of them, but I could get why someone whose family got deported or who thought they were protecting trans people's lives or claimed we were days away from a fascist takeover might feel compelled to act.
But "he's a pedophile rapist traitor" is a bit thin on the face of it. "He raped my sister" or "he's about to sell nukes to Russia" would have more oomph.
According to your interpretation of the research, 10 of those men are fucking 60 of the women.
Not quite.
There's some subset of women who aren't having sexual encounters at all.
Of the women having sexual encounters, this implies that about 60% of those encounters are with a particular subset of men.
And then we ALSO have data that women are on average having more sexual encounters than ever.
So contingent on the amount of women actually having sex (somewhere around 80% of young women, based on self reports) the vast majority of their sex is with a small cohort of men.
And the contingent of men having sex is decreasing fairly quickly. Suggesting that the % of men on the receiving end of these sexual encounters is getting even more exclusive.
The only sane interpretation is that women are having more sex, on average, with a smaller pool of guys.
Which is, ONCE AGAIN, backed up by data from Dating apps.
A small % of guys are even matching with women, let alone having sex with them.
80% of men are unacceptable to women" does not fit real-world observations. Are 80% of adult men today incels? Really? Are 80% of young men not dating or having sex at all?
Am I the only one that uses google anymore?
Half of Young men just aren't dating.
Around 45% have never asked a woman out at all.
That's 50% out of the pool already. Do you think a guy who turns 25 with minimal/zero dating experience is likely to turn that around and have success with women by age 30?
As of 2023, 60% of young men reported they were single. That number. 34% of young women reported being single. WHO ARE THE WOMEN DATING if not those young men?
As of 2026, around 34% of young men report being in a 'serious' relationship.. Situation is not really improving.
So we're hovering somewhere around 70% of young dudes who are not currently on trajectory to get married.
You tell me why that would be, if men actually want to get married. What's the holdup, why can't they attract a partner?
There's little reason to think that'll improve.
And you can hear women tell you the exact same thing straight from their mouth.
"If your standards don't eliminate most, they're not high enough."
"I'd rather die alone... ...than know that I didn't get it all."
This is being openly stated, in publicly viewable forums, young women TELLING YOU DIRECTLY that most men aren't sufficient for them. THEY'RE NOT HIDING IT.
Why would that be? What possible explanation is there other than... some large % of men (60%? 70%? 80%?) don't rise to their notice.
I've discussed each of these individual points before, of course. Its getting very rote to have this discussion when the data still says the same thing, and all the new data just reinforces the existing point.
My precise position is that about 50% of men are invisible to women, with an additional 30% that only become visible on occasion once acknowledged.
I think I take your meaning, but allow me to try and parse this:
The markets expect that the unexpected will happen. I guess its just a wait and see thing, account for the uncertainty.
And as much as Obama provides good precedent, I think the subsequent years where Hillary and then Biden locked down the nom against upstarts (including Bernie... twice) makes it less likely.
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