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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.

Someone should inform my wife

As an aside, it’s ironic that women fear men the most in a place like Korea, statistically one of the safest, close to being THE safest place to be a woman on earth. I wonder what this fact says about women and gender relations . 4B makes a lot more sense in a place like South Africa or perhaps Sudan or Chad. But Korea? Lol

The only reason 4B ‘works’ in Korea (or at least doesn’t instantly collapse as farcical) is precisely because Korean society is actually great for women. In Africa if you try to withhold sex from men in general, or especially your husband, you’ll just get raped, and everyone will call you an idiot because OBVIOUSLY that’s what would happen.

Say what you will about sexual violence’s moral deficiencies, but it does keep women in line, as the fertility rates in Africa demonstrate.

This feels like the uncanny valley of civil rights & protesting. A truly authoritarian country doesn't have protests, because everyone knows they will be squashed. Presumably South African women have it so bad, protesting would just anger the men.

Is it actually an uncanny valley? Do we know for sure that utopias don't have any complainers? Given that utopia is impossible*, is the question even meaningful? Yudkowsky's recent post on future humans being impoverished by lack of oxygen makes a lot of sense to me. As an average progress-critical reactionary, I think its human nature to want more, so my rule is simply the more protests and 4B movements, the better everything is.

I've heard this phenomenon called "Tocqueville effect/paradox". @MaiqTheTrue

From Democracy in America:

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.

See also: the psychoanalytical concept of the "narcissism of small differences".

I don’t think it’s a valley, I think it’s a sort of truism of political life. Complaints and protests tend to happen in places where said problem is least apparent. Environmental protests happen where the environment is well cared for, marital protests happen where women are safe, screams of authoritarian regimes happen where arbitrary arrests don’t.

Same reason why (sane) people don't start expressing rage at someone pointing a gun at them. Anger is used as a tool when you think it'll work in favor of your interests rather than against them.

You forgot to expand your asterisk.