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Maybe I'm stunted, but I think this is an essentially elementary school bullshit, on the level of pulling girls by their braids (does anyone still do it?) or calling boys/girls gross: confused flirtation going too far. To the extent that adult American women are sincere in saying that they're less afraid of a bear, they're stunted too; unfit to be citizens, literally infantile, living in an egocentric world where "beliefs" are merely transient activations of the underdeveloped brain, means to coordinate physical wailing and flailing to get gibs from the infinitely caring environment. Admittedly this is an adaptive mode of reasoning in a spoils-based society, so long as you belong to the correct caste.
But I presume they aren't sincere, for the most part, and just do not care about contents of their words or the impact on too serious men. So it's signaling and taking jabs at men.
Few great comedians are women, but on average women are impressively adept at wordplay and deadpan sarcasm, in my experience.
Now as for men and their daughters, this is more obviously pure signaling to fit into the stereotype of an overprotective macho. No one's actually leaving anyone in a forest with a bear or a stranger, so it's a cost-free signal.
This is all trivial. The interesting question here, if any, is whether norms encouraging such long-winded and massive pranks are acceptable or a sign of dysfunction. Remember, many Americans are in fact retarded, paranoid, schizophrenic, pathologically anxious etc. – a middle-class joke that's presented as consensus can have real impact. Is [functional] 85 IQ enough to reliably distinguish ubiquitous mean-spirited kidding from common sense, without it leaking into world-model representations? Is 80? 75? The true distribution is not Gaussian, there are lumps on both tails, and plenty of outliers.
Beyond this straightforward utilitarian concern for unwell people and their close ones, though, I'd say the problem of normalizing casual deadpan sarcastic misogyny is the same as with any other kind of mistreatment, and the appropriate response is the same as we see high-agency minority groups provide to politically incorrect smartasses. It is perceived, correctly, as the beginning of a slippery slope towards rhetorical superweapons and physical discrimination. In a degenerating culture like the modern American one, defending your personal and your collective identity's honor is in fact the sane attractor; it's unsustainable for some subpopulation, even if it be all men, to be all sticks-and-stones-but-words stoics, and others be of the "if they don't fight back this means we can hit harder" persuasion. (I'd go so far as to say that you can't be a stoic period; stoics are simply cuckolds with extra steps, just like their hero Marcus Aurelius was a literal cuckold. But that's beside the point).
My (obvious) belief is that it's not really acceptable but there's little that could be done.
Repeal the 19th
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I don't think there's a difference between a 'sincere' statement and 'signaling' statement - the words emerge from the same processes, the same process that generates 'abortion is a FUNDAMENTAL right', and the same process that 'everyone is beautiful in their own unique way <3'. I wish the average person had a clean separation between signaling beliefs and sincere ones, everything would be so much nicer.
And, of course, if teleported 10 m from a bear with saliva dripping from its canines and 10 m away from a random male, the same woman would run away towards the man, that's a deep instinct one can't deny.
I think the above belief is closer to just a 'stupid popular belief' than a long-winded prank, and as such is just a universal human phenomena. But long-winded games of social deception are also human universals, small-scale human societies are no more honest and harmonious than we are, and intelligence and self-interest combined necessarily leads to such games.
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I think a lot of WEIRD people are stunted. And I don’t think men would do much better in a similarly worded “would you rather” scenario aimed at them. The issue is that the way we raise kids and the way we’re taught (or more properly mis-taught to judge risks, rewards, and dangers) tends to create an entire culture of infantile adults who can’t understand let alone handle the real world. And we do it to ourselves.
The first issue is extreme safetyism. We’ve gone from being a frontier people who were used to handling our own lives and the risks that came with it, to a people that are suffering from anxiety and depression in probably the safest environment humanity has ever known: a country that hasn’t had a war on her own soil in almost 200 years, where the biggest health risks are diseases of gluttony or old age, where most people face the workplace dangers of paper cuts, and where we commute strapped into cars that are designed to withstand collisions going much faster than they normally go. And I think a lot of it is down to safetyist lifestyles that not only don’t teach people to reasonably handle a risk, but create a mindset in which you’re taught to ruminate on the idea of injury death, insult and loss.
The second thing we’ve been taught is to put our own feelings on the level of facts. I’m not suggest that your feelings don’t matter at all, but I do think that we’ve put them much too far forward in our thinking process, which leads to all kinds of problems. First of all, feelings about a subject are not always true. You might be afraid of spiders, but if they aren’t actually dangerous to you, that fear is only going to harm you by diminishing your own life and your ability to live it. Second, focusing on feelings especially negative feelings just makes you feel worse. Focusing on positive emotions isn’t all that great either if you get so attached to the good feelings that the loss of them is catastrophic to you, or leads to unrealistic expectations of what life is like. Negative emotions are normal, and losses are common. You will experience both often. And if you’re focused on feelings, you’ll be miserable.
The third thing is that we aren’t taught to look to facts. Nobody is asking whether a thing they believe is actually true. They aren’t taught statistics, probability or logic in school, so they have no real toolsets to use to decide what is real or not or whether a thing they read or see is true. What are the actual facts on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza? Would this not change how we think about what to do in those situations? What is the actual cause of inflation? Would knowledge of the cause change what we do to solve it?
I think the best things to teach kids are sensible risk taking, stoicism and not getting attached to luxury, and good sound thinking and truth-seeking. These things can be taught, and to be honest we used to teach them. In STEM and philosophy we still do. It’s just that we’ve removed most of this from the curriculum of people who don’t need to use them for work and then wonder why our systems don’t work and problems don’t get solved.
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Jokey or not, it does reveal that it is socially accepted and even fashionable to denigrate men.
Two astronauts orbiting, one with his arm extended, holding a handgun.
Come on, it's fun as long as it's just a joke. You can poke fun at women too, though it's different kinds of jokes.
The problem is that nobody is joking.
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Not if there are any around.
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That's how I took it, and in that sense the whole meme seems pretty fun. It's just bants, confused flirting at worst, like you said. But then, I regret to inform you, that the male (or otherwise) feminists are at it again taking the whole fun out of it.
Maybe the devil is the details on this one? But my personal take is that the misandry is off the charts here. As in, I'm people saying they'd choose the bear because men are necrophilies.
The big divide I see, however, it's the same as I always seen. Theory people and practical people are just going to see things in an entirely different light. So I think for the theory people it's fun and bants, for the practical people, I think for them it becomes a bit more serious, because to essentially "obey" this concept isn't really healthy. The question really I personally have is how much should men hold themselves accountable for triggering these reactions? And it's not a theoretical, right? Because I've seen enough cases where having the wrong type of person present acts as a barrier to inclusion (which is supposed to be good and proper and what everybody wants).
Should people be aware of the effect of their presence on potential other people, or this something we're supposed to ignore and just push through?
If having the wrong type of person present acts as a barrier to inclusion, then "inclusion" taken seriously is self-defeating and should be discarded as a concept. If having one type of person present discourages other types of people, you must make a choice of which to include and which to exclude; this is not "inclusion" but "discrimination".
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It's funny how so many people online think that's a good response but all it does is serve as yet another example of how poorly so many people understand and use statistics.
Passing remidial statistics should be a requirement to be given the vote. If you don't understand the difference between standard deviation and variance then for the benefit of society you should be disenfranchised.
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Ugh, I can't watch more than five seconds because I know where it's going.
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