domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4hr ago
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.
2rafa
4hr ago
Bunch of UFO unsolved mysteries science fiction fans grew up and joined the DoD / MIC / Congress, and now they’re powerful enough to commission and staff these “investigations” where they get to sperg over found footage and can demand to be taken on tours of Area 51 outbuildings to forage for aliens in long unopened refrigerators.
There is nothing more to it.
Crowstep
4hr ago
My immediate reaction to this 'movement' is the same as when I see the 'we're not having kids because it's too expensive' or even 'we're not having kids because of global warming'. A rationalisation for what's going on, not a true reason. After all, Korea's birth rate been low for decades, and only now are the women supposedly swearing off men?
There are clearly a lot of things that contribute to Korea's low birth rate; the punishing work culture, the educational arms race, the pathological status obsession, hyper-urbanism, the lack of in-person socialising (and the comparative amount of spending time online), the sleep deprivation. I see the breakdown in gender relations as a symptom of all this, rather than the cause.
I can get behind some wall spaghetti testing
Double tilde: 30% vs. 90%
Triple tilde:30% vs.
High-spatial efficiency double tilde: ≈30% vs. ≈90%
EDIT: this is a known issue, see https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues/736
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
Oh yeah, I should've mentioned that. But you are correct. Lots of multiplayer games (TF2 but also others) have balancing mechanisms to even out the number of players on each team if they get too lopsided. So all of a sudden you can find yourself playing on the other team. The reference isn't meant to be taken literally, because obviously there isn't an algorithm switching allegiances around IRL. It's really just a jokey way to say "America has switched sides".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
· Edited 4hr ago
As I said to @TokenTransGirl, this isn't really my cause area and I don't have sufficient trustworthy information to be able to opine on the big Ought questions of proper treatment. There certainly exists a population that will desist if not "supported", and there almost certainly exists a population that won't; trustworthy data on how big these two populations are and whether it's possible to distinguish between them is the key determinant of the correct answer, but it would seem extremely difficult to acquire and I certainly don't have it. Some of the experiments you'd want to run don't even seem like the experimental protocol could successfully be followed (e.g. the obvious and central "what percentage of people who want transition in current Western society will resolve positively if transition is denied long-term"; in current Western society, how are you going to stop them?), and the studies that can be (and are) done frequently have huge bias issues (in both directions, depending on the allegiance of the researchers).
On the smaller questions, I oppose pro-trans censorship (both in the academic publishing system and more generally in social spaces) and I oppose people who try to portray the anti-trans movement as being inherently senseless and hateful. No surprises there. My personal stance on pronouns is "I won't use a pronoun someone doesn't like in front of that person, but I won't intentionally use neopronouns or singular "they" under any circumstances and I occasionally won't use a he/she/it pronoun if I think it's inappropriate (e.g. if the person is clearly insane in other ways and I suspect it's just a phase/delusion); I am prepared to spam names if necessary to thread that needle" (as noted above, my position on other people using pronouns is "free speech lol"), and my stance on deadname-erasure (on e.g. Wikipedia) is "fuck off with this Orwellian shit" although I'm willing to use the new one going forward.
If you want something else, ask.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5hr ago
I don't think I agree. If I saw a similar-looking meme from the right when Biden had taken office I would have cringed. There's a joke there, it's a tiny bit funnier than one of those braindead and overly-labeled political comics you'd see in a newspaper, but barely. It's a step in the right direction, but it's lacking....heart? authenticity?
Truth. It's lacking the "it's-funny-because-it's-true" bit. And I suppose 50% of that is simply me not agreeing with the substance, but 50% of that is just pure made up. Like, even for a left-winger who does believe Trump is authoritarian and is sympathetic to the other dictators, I don't think any of them genuinely believe he is going to join them and have the U.S. declare war on Ukraine. And also South Korea, and Taiwan for some reason. Who thinks Trump is pro-China???
Again, if the right had made a meme about the U.S. bombing Taiwan in 2020 because of the Biden-China connections, I would have cringed. This is not a good meme.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5hr ago
Thanks man. I appreciate the support. It was indeed a frustrating conversation, but on the other hand it's been out of my mind since then so I guess it couldn't have been that bad lol
I do agree with your broader point, that the people who kind of push people away from the faith the most are the super traditional ones. IDK why, exactly, I am sure it's not their intent. All I know is just about every time I go on /r/catholocism I come away from it going "man those people are crazy and if I didn't know lots of very nice Catholics IRL I would run screaming".
TwiceHuman
5hr ago
This is all getting silly. Women vote differently from men because they're more emotional, social and subjective. So they're camp "It's fine if everything gets worse, as long as we're not mean" while men tend towards "It's fine if we're mean, as long as our society improves".
There's like half a standard deviation of difference in the distribution of personality traits, which causes these differences in voting outcomes. There's no need to fabricate any wars, and act like natural tendencies are a way of punishing eachother and securing ones power. "Why are men keeping women out of engineering?" They just like engineering at a higher frequency.
Trying to pressure other people into having the same values as yourself is, and always was, bad taste. And both genders are biologically hardwired to enjoy sex. None of this is necessary, I know because I still hang out in communities with zero politics, and in which men and women enjoy eachother and in which people would be confused if you talked about power dynamics or even a gender divide.
Now, I don't disagree with your takes on the issue, I reject the issue itself and suggest that you do the same. I ended up replying to you because your comment is short and approachable
If a majority of people want to end democracy, I cannot think of an argument against it. If you're pro-democracy because you think the majorty is right, then you wouldn't be justified in stopping the majority from ending democracy. If you value democracy because it's correct, then you're also saying that you're wrong when the majority disagrees with you, which it would in this example. I can still save it, though. Suppose democracy was not about correctness, but rather about freedom. Then it would pain you to see people having the freedom to choose that they wouldn't want to be free anymore. But this choice imposes on the freedoms of those who still wants to be free. But if people say "I like democracy" when what they mean is "I like freedom", then people become confused and we reach the wrong conclusions, so it's important not to confuse ends and means. Democracy is not your highest value, it's something else which is unstated and which correlates with democracy.
is a valid critique of democracy
Yes, but then it's not democracy which is optimized for, but rather "good opinions", which democracy once did better. But now we have a problem, for while I can agree with your take, there's no objective way to measure if we're correct or if we're mislead. For democracy used to be how we measured, and now we have made something out to be more important than democracy, which we have no way to measure.
the people putting in place mandates should really have considered the second order effects
Vaccine skepticism can be blamed on those who promoted the vaccines. They repeatedly acted like people who were out to mislead you and put you in danger, while stating the opposite. For instance, they said "These vaccines are completely safe", but also that neither these companies, nor the government, would be to blame if getting the vaccine went horribly wrong for you. "I promise you this is safe, but I take no responsibility for the consequences" is a statement which will make people distrust you. Now, this doesn't imply that the vaccine isn't safe, merely that it's reasonable and logical to doubt that it is. About 10 more things like this happened (documents being held back, people being told that herd immunity would occur, being being told that the vaccine prevented you from spreading or getting Covid, both claims which turned out to be false), etc etc etc.
So, again, even if the vaccine is perfectly safe, the only reasonable response to somebody repeatedly lying to you, and even trying to use political and legal pressure to force you to inject something in your body which hasn't even been properly tested, is resistance. It's not the counter-movements fault that people distrust vaccines, but the sheer incompetence of the main movement.
No, but "if you were able to drive sober airbags wouldn't be a top issue" still works as a non nonsensical retort.
If you remove the reckless drivers from the road the value of car safety features goes down substantially
TwiceHuman
5hr ago
I generally agree with everything you wrote, but I wouldn't limit myself to just trustworthiness. I think there's a sort of "brainrot" quality to modern news which is independent of truthfulness. A lot of articles are "watch this silly video" or "guy does whacky thing". That's news exploiting other psychological needs, which is a bad direction to go in, because you end up with people optimizing only for the thing which triggers rewards in the brain, without the substance. Instead of news which are also interesting, we're getting interesting things which aren't news. This is like selling lootboxes without the videogames, or sugar without the food, or fanservice without the story.
By the way, I seem to remember journalists being people who put their lives on the line in order to fight against corruption (that it was almost an admirable job to have). It seems like the news are now owned by those who are corrupt, though, causing a disconnect with the average viewer. One of the causes is that the scope (size/range) of news media is too big. Decentralized news for every local area is superior to everyone reading the exact same set of global news. And to large companies, we're just numbers on a spreadsheet, so the human element is lost. This is a another kind of disconnect, and honest news alone cannot make up for it (objectivity and empathy are different after all) Anyway, a small sphere of concern is essential to psychological health, most of the mental health problems lately can be attributed to people who worry about far-away things while neglecting what's near to them (like themselves and their family, factors which are actually within their ability to influence or control).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6hr ago
Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.
Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).
My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
6hr ago
Sorry for being unavailable, by the way. My excuses are kid's joining Kindergarten and I started at a new time-consuming job.
I wanted to reply to this but forgot about it, but this did get really personal and I know I also found it frustrating, and actually kind of laughable in that sense. Like you give a shit whether a married stranger on the internet thinks you're marriageable.
I'm with you, man. But I think this interchange illuminated one of the big lessons I've learned from being on the motte: the worst enemy of men who struggle romantically isn't progressives, but traditionalists.
Progressives will tell you you're lonely by making up all sorts of just-world reasons why you're a bad person, but traditionalists will come right out and say they think you're unworthy of being married because you're a weak, cowardly man. What you've learned from this interchange is that it's not just the men who think that in trad communities, but the women too. And even hydroacetylene has gone on record that the trad approach to dating doesn't actually work very well.
I'm certainly a pretty conservative believer, but what I've learned from the motte is that I absolutely, under no circumstances, want to be a trad Catholic. Or at least a trad Catholic disagreeable enough to post on a politics board. They are fanatically bad apologists for their understanding of the Christian approach to gender roles and even for their understanding of the Gospel.
Whatever they think they're doing, our local trads are doing the very opposite of evangelism. Someday they will have to make an account for their behavior before the throne of the Lord. And I hope the judgment will not be too heavy upon any of us, distracted from prayer and charity by useless arguments and the sound of clanging gongs.
There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose.
To be fair i think this goes for men too. I don't think this has to do with denigration of women's work or anything but with the very extended retirement and generally privileged existence of a good portion of the current generation of "elderly". The retirement, where people are protected from a lot of current hardships through various policies such as Medicare, inflation protected pensions or the abolishment of property tax (while simultaneously massively benefiting from their inflated value) leads to a sort of reversed and very prolonged adolescence where slightly diminished but perfectly capable people mentally, socially and spiritually degenerate through disassociation from the economy and purpose in general. Being a reality divorced leech isn't very admirable, regardless of age.
Men aren't protected from this much more than women, even if they often retire a bit later and aren't stay at home moms with kids in school.
People who keep working usually are worthy of respect though and I do respect most of my seniors at work, men and women. There are a few retired people I respect, they are almost always very active with helping out caring for their grandchildren, but can also be active in some kind of local charitable organisation.
HalloweenSnarry
6hr ago
Perhaps the argument could be made that we can in fact throw the book hard at drug offenders, and that we have indeed done so to the point that DAs, lacking a less-harsh punishment, choose not to punish at all.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
6hr ago
are far more severe than in the West.
The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East, and if you assume the Easterners are better workers that only serves to compound the problem (i.e. they need an even greater level of opportunity to function correctly than even the average American does simply because they're more efficient at exploiting it, so a lack of that opportunity is going to be harder on them).
That's part of why the US leads Western TFR (despite the generous terms European countries give to their citizens to have children it doesn't seem to be helping, but remember that the average European is significantly worse off compared to the average American even before the US sabotaged their gas supply). Twice the population for the same regional GDP paints an awfully grim picture and that's been true even before the MENA human wave.
And the Indians aren't a refutation of this, because their urban areas (40% urbanization) are just as bad for TFR, but perhaps it's a different story when your standards are that low? (I'd argue the same for China, but maybe that falls apart considering I also made this point about 100-year-ago US, which kind of had the same thing going on.)
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6hr ago
For the extreme example, /r/raisedbyborderlines. It's actually kind of a fascinating place in that the median poster there is from an oddly niche demographic: They're usually the daughter (in an otherwise male-dominated website), almost always consider themselves the scapegoat child (and their brother the golden child who usually remained enmeshed with the mother and is thus some variety of emotionally stunted), and have a spineless father who remained married to their mother (when BPD isn't usually correlated with long-lasting marriages).
Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
7hr ago
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.
Felagund
7hr ago
Thank you!
Given that you have more experience than most, then, what do your opinions look like on trans-related issues?
urquan
7hr ago
I didn't post the meme originally, but several people had just expressed they didn't understand it and I was just trying to be helpful.
gattsuru
7hr ago
The current HHS head is a HerbaLife fan.
I’d love to have better options, and I’m disappointed that the Trump one is this, but I think people badly underestimate how bad our institutions are.
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.
More options
Context Copy link