domain:youtu.be
SteveKirk
16m ago
My suspicion is that the race thing got a bit too real once journalists and academics started losing jobs to dei, they don't want to touch the transsexual thing with a 10' dilator right now, and so the only culture war left to push is warmed-over '14-'18 feminism.
And the idea of not pushing on any culture war front just doesn't occur to people who consider journalism and activism to be synonymous
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
16m ago
I consider you to be a disposable object to be used, and your feelings on the matter are irrelevant because you're not really even a person
This is how I treat my toilet paper. However I would not say I hate my toilet paper at all, in fact I am usually very grateful that it is present (assuming no bidet etc.) and would be very upset if it were missing.
Hate requires having a certain intensity of feeling and even if we were talking about particularly poor toilet paper I've got better things to do than give the requisite number epicycles to thinking so hard about the toilet paper than I can reasonably say I hate it (perhaps if it were the toilet paper used in all the toilets at my workplace so I used it on a daily basis then yes I might dedicate enough cycles, but if it's like a toilet in a shopping mall I rarely ever visit then sorry, I don't have the brain cycles to waste on hating the toilet paper).
For someone who's very sexually successful they may well have better things to do than waste their limited number of brain cycles on what exactly their next sex partner thinks, no different to how I have zero desire to waste brain cycles on what the guy sitting next to me on the train thinks, purely because of how abundance makes humans value things less, no hate involved (were the guy next to me on the train the only person I'd met in the last month I'd probably care about what he thought, but under current conditions, he's just an "eh").
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17m ago
Firefighters arriving after the fire starts is perfectly fine.
However, if the firefighters are wandering around with petrol and matches before the fire starts, then we have problems - especially when it comes to paying them a hefty bill for their services.
Felagund
18m ago
Everyone who brings up the suicide discourse to score a point is contributing to the problem. We know that suicide, like many other things, spreads socially; that's why newspapers try not to cover suicides too much. But for some reason, we decide to convince teenagers that the proper way to spite people who won't give them the gender treatment that they want is by suicide. No wonder suicide rates are astronomical.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
23m ago
The problem is, we don’t have cures. We have drugs that at particular doses have positive risk/benefit ratios for a particular condition for most patients. If every bottle of Tylenol is priced to cover the liability for liver damage I’m not sure pharmacies continue to exist.
Felagund
28m ago
Oh, woah, I hadn't realized that you were ex-trans. Have you given a description of what things were like for you somewhere? Your life history? (If so, where? If not, I'd be interested.)
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
30m ago
Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology.
Agreed. Just take a look at Elon Musk's progeny. The expected value of grandchildren he's going to get from one of his normal children is much higher than the expected value of grandchildren he'll get from his trans daughter. Iterate for a few generations and the deleterious memetic mutations will weed themselves out.
Felagund
30m ago
"I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it."
While I'm sure that a great many of the people in the process have good intentions, I do not think that they are often acting with good judgment. In your example, killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context. But it does not merely suffice that you think that what you're doing is the right situation ("they really had it coming"), but that it actually be that.
I don't really have a good sense of what things were like for castrati. I think they (or at least, those who were successful) were not infrequently of fairly high social status, but I'm not at all sure of that.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
43m ago
I’m still getting a feel for it, but to be honest early observations are very concerning. A lot of academics just spouting extremely simplistic leftist takes. I’m trying to see how my pushback is received. I’m sure I’ll have more observations later.
jeroboam
44m ago
Agreed, this is wishcasting. Almost no one in the real world is doing this. The whole premise is bunk anyway. Most women don't want weak men who bend to society. They want strong men who mold reality.
Probably the bigger problem in South Korea isn't misogyny but rather effeminate men.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
47m ago
When I mentioned "the worship of the weak and ugly and broken" I was referring to Wokeness as a whole that elevates ugly and broken people.
The big point I’m trying to get across is that while ressentiment toward popular attractive normal white people is a major component of wokeness, it has not significantly impacted pop music during the time you’re claiming that it did. There were still tons of normal attractive white pop stars during this time, selling out arenas. For every Lizzo there’s a dozen thin and sexually normative men and women outselling her and outperforming her on the charts.
If anything, pop music is far more the exclusive domain of pretty people than it was in previous eras you’re pointing to; the collapse of “bands” as a viable commercial music model led to a marked decrease in the number of unattractive-but-musically-gifted pop musicians. In the 1970s and 80s, Billy Joel could become a successful popular musician, selling out arenas to young people. There is no equivalent whatsoever in the world of pop music today. Maybe Adele? But of course Adele was noted as an extreme exception at the time because it was so rare for unattractive people to become successful and marketable pop musicians - and it still is today.
Can you just acknowledge that Katy Perry's "persona" is not the same as Taylor Swift's? And that the latter is playing a straight archetype of popular white girl? Katy Perry is not going for that, she has her own image and look. I don't think Katy Perry plays the "popular girl next door" persona like Swift does. I don't think Perry goes for the "Prom Queen white girl vibe" like Swift embraces.
No, I do not acknowledge that, which is the whole source of our disagreement.
Firstly, on the subject of Katy Perry: I would submit her music video for “Teenage Dream” as a perfect encapsulation of the “popular and attractive white girl has sex with jocky white guy” archetype you’re pointing to. Katy Perry in her prime was every bit the gorgeous prom-queen type of woman you’re gesturing at; is it just the fact that she isn’t blonde and Germanic-looking responsible for you associating her with some other sort of image? I’m not sure what “archetype” you imagine her to be portraying.
Now, on to Taylor Swift. Which era of Swift’s career are we talking about? Like, the whole conceit of the Eras tour is based on the fact that her image, the thematic content of her music, her appearance, have all fluctuated dramatically throughout various junctures in her career. These fluctuations can roughly be sorted in terms of her different albums, or at least in clusters of albums.
The first stage of her career was her “country era”: her eponymous debut album (2006), Fearless (2008), and Speak Now (2010). On these albums she absolutely does not embody the “popular girl/prom queen” archetype; again, on her biggest hit from this era (“You Belong With Me”) she very explicitly places herself in contrast with this archetype. Her lyrical themes in this era are about vulnerable and wholesome teen romance, from the perspective of a sort of outsider. (Swift herself never finished high school, instead transferring to a homeschooling academy that could accommodate her extensive touring schedule.) Her Christian upbringing heavily influenced her lyrical content and image at this time. The “girl next door” archetype may be tentatively applied to her at this time, although it’s specifically the kind of girl who will expect you to marry her before she puts out. (So, certainly not the archetypal “prom queen”, who traditionally has a healthy sex life with her jock prom queen boyfriend.
Then you have her pop-transition era with Red (2012) and 1989 (2014). I will grant you that in this specific era, she’s more comfortably embodying the “hot popular girl with conventional interests and opinions common to mainstream white people” archetype. She also surrounded herself in public with a bunch of models and attractive female celebrities, nearly all of them white. If you were making your argument during this period of time, I would uncontroversially agree with you. Still, though, none of these albums include any swear words, so she’s still hanging onto her more reserved and conservative roots at this time.
Then on Reputation (2017) she becomes more jaded, self-conscious, and ambivalent about her fame, her public reputation (hence the album title), her romantic failures, etc. It’s the first Swift album with a swear word, and it also contains a ton of more “urban” musical influences. Its lyrical content contains a lot of personal introspection, discussion of her own personal foibles, and emotional depth. It is certainly not the work of someone who is blithely comfortable in her own skin and her own high-status normality, which is what the “prom queen” archetype is all about.
On Lover (2019) she’s somewhat back to the popular-girl side of her personality; it’s also the first Swift album containing political commentary, with the song “You Need To Calm Down” crudely attacking “homophobia”. Still, though, it’s decent ammunition for your claim that she’s leaning into the “popular girl” thing. (Other than on “Paper Wings”, my favorite song on the album.)
However, this archetype is totally abandoned on Folklore (2020) and Evermore (2020). This is where she begins her “crunchy art hoe” era. These albums have an almost Joni Mitchell style singer-songwriter vibe. They’re not anything that a prom queen would be capable of producing or identifying with. Everything from the production to Swift’s image during this time is very understated, very organic, very unpreposessing. (During this time, Swift put out a ton of videos of her at home with no makeup, in her pajamas, hanging out with her cats and writing music. This is the work of someone who wants to project a very different sort of “normality” than the popular girl/influencer type.)
Now with her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, she’s still pretty much in her artsy era, although of course the authenticity of it is somewhat complicated by the fact that she’s now a billionaire. And of course especially now that she’s dating Travis Kelce and is looking hotter than ever, that “popular girl with the jock boyfriend” is an unavoidable part of her public persona, since it’s actually uncontrovertibly true about her for the first time in her life. But it has not been a constant throughout her career, is not the primary reason for her popularity (since it wasn’t true during large portions of her success and popularity) and is only one element of her appeal. Popular girls can see themselves in Swift, but so can gawky PMC and academic types, and even conservative Christian purity types can vibe strongly with her first three albums. She’s a chameleon of sorts, not really an “archetype” or “persona” in the way you’re claiming. She’s many things to many people, and any attempt to reduce her to a particular archetype is going to run up against counterexamples from her own life and career, depending on where you want to point to.
jeroboam
51m ago
Yes. Fix torts and we can unlock a lot of benefits. But let's not put the cart before the horse.
hydroacetylene
51m ago
They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)
This seems common with pagan cultures. Like we knock on Islam for its(tbh, pretty repressive) treatment of women, but Islamic religion does tell husbands to take their wives' wants and needs into account and care for them. Scott just reviewed a book all about how early Christianity spread by telling women that it would make their husbands love them. And a pretty good chunk of the republican fertility advantage in the US comes from telling young women that socially conservative values will make men love them and treat them better(there's an entire genre of country music about loving on women who are babycrazy and have strong family values and how they're worth holding off on sex for and cutting back on drinking to reasonable levels and all that).
You don't have to deny women opportunities on a societal level to make their lives suck. Women are not the same as men, you can totally set up society to make it so they get the short end of the stick in hundreds of little ways.
jeroboam
51m ago
Let's see what RFK can do. Maybe we'll start directing dollars towards effective interventions and away from ruinously expensive and ineffective ones.
I agree that America should be more like Europe and Asia by harshly prosecuting violent crime and refusing to tolerate drugs. We should probably also adopt European food standards where breakfast cereal has 5 simple ingredients instead of 20 unpronouncable ones.
ThenElection
54m ago
I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war. The gender gap remained the same, or even decreased : https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/
Even if you think there's new evidence that says it makes sense to use sex as a carrot to convince men to vote Democratic, isn't going full Lysistrata a bad idea? If Democratic women go on an absolute intimacy strike while Republican women are still happy to form relationships etc., for men who would be swayed by such things, it just creates an incentive to become Republican.
Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.
All of this is probably overthinking things, though, as it seems mostly like a temper tantrum of the overly online set.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
55m ago
babies are recommended to get 2 influenza shots in the first 12 months of life, so the number is 20 and not 18.
The standard recommendation is one shot in the first year of life.
If we're counting the combos, MMR & DTaP would count for 24 and not 18 (8 total doses of these shots).
Yes, 24 is the number I used after breaking down the vaccine cocktails.
HPV is 2 or 3 doses.
HPV is one or two doses.
When I count, I get 72 or 73 not including the RSV.
You are still hiding the ball, because you've counted 47 with some fudging and there's only 24 other recommended shots on the schedule. Even with these inflated numbers you only get 71. "A hundred dollars? What do you need fifty dollars for?"
boosters (teal),
Boosters are not teal, teal shots are not recommended for all children.
jeroboam
56m ago
Didn't the UK have some sort of "Freedom Day" and then totally renege on it?
jeroboam
1hr ago
Interesting and probably true. If we just "let it rip" it's likely we would have ended with fewer overall deaths as the disease would have quickly exhausted itself. The Omicron event would have happened in March 2020 instead of January 2022.
Obviously, in this counterfactual, the acute phase would have been awful. Hospitals would have been overrun, but it's unclear how much lifesaving care was happening anyway. Irresponsible use of ventilators definitely killed lots of people who would have survived otherwise.
In nearly every country, the damage caused by the Covid response was worse than the disease itself. China gets an F. Australia gets a D-. Sweden did it best, but I think that's only because there wasn't a "Super Sweden" that simply ignored the disease completely. (Maybe some African countries fit that bill due to lack of state capacity).
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.
I'm not worried about humanity going extinct. I am worried about losing the ability to maintain an industrial society. Like there will be Amish in 200 years, but an all-subsistence-farmer society sucks. And yes, I am aware that the Amish are not pure subsistence farmers, but they depend on being able to trade with industrial society for inputs like solar panels to maintain the not-subsistence-agriculture parts of their society.
erwgv3g34
1hr ago
From "Marriage Makes You Rich and Stupid" by Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle:
Marriage allows you to pool nonrival goods, such as Netflix accounts, but also what economist Bryan Caplan calls “semi-rival goods,” such as kitchens and cars:
Two childless singles, each earning $50,000 a year, marry. Both keep working, living by the old-school principle of "share and share alike." What happens to their material standard of living? If all depends on how rivalrous their consumption bundle is.
If all their goods are rival (like food), the answer is "Their standard of living stays the same." $50,000 times two divided by two equals $50,000.
If all their goods are non-rival (like Internet access), the answer is "Their standard of living doubles." They pool their money and buy a $100,000 lifestyle for both of them.
In the real world, of course, couples are rarely at either pole Most goods are in fact semi-rival. Consider housing. If you share your home with a spouse, you don't have as much space for yourself as a solitary occupant of the same property. But both of you probably enjoy the benefits of more than half a house. If a couple owns one car, similarly, both have more than half a car. Even food is semi-rival, as the classic "You gonna eat that?" question proves.
But this is not the only benefit of marriage. Marriage also enables specialization. Which can be illustrated by a piece of wisdom I have developed in my brief three and a half years of marital bliss and now pass onto my friends who are getting married: “Marriage makes you stupid.”
I mean, I used to know where I kept my batteries and old documents. But when we got married, my husband, who is much tidier than I am, took over organizing the house. Now, unless it’s a piece of my clothing or kitchen equipment, I have no idea where we keep anything. And while I’m pretty sure I used to be able to put up shelves, now all I know how to do is ask my husband to do it.
On the other hand, he has no idea how much money we have, or in what accounts. And he can’t do the grocery shopping, because he doesn’t know what we consume. Individually, we are less competent to survive on our own. But collectively, we eat better, and we have a tidier house and better-managed finances. And our shelves don’t fall down so often.
Obviously, child-rearing is a major area of specialization. One interesting thing I’ve heard from gay parents is that they find themselves falling into roles that you might describe as “Mom” and “Dad,” even though this is obviously not some pre-programmed gender destiny. It just doesn’t make sense to try to jointly manage a kid 50-50; one parent keeps the social calendar and decides what kids Junior can play with, because two parents trying to do it actually makes the task take a lot more time, as both people have to learn about all the friends and the birthdays and the parents, and then negotiate what Junior does with her time. I’m not saying this happens with every gay parent. I’m just saying that gay parents I know report considerable benefits to specialization.
Specialization also allows for external income gains -- perhaps one reason that married men make a lot more than single ones do and married households are richer than single ones. Some of that is selection effect, of course -- stable, responsible men are probably more likely to get married, especially in this day and age.
So while pooling nonrival and semi-rival goods is an excellent benefit of marriage, it is far from the only one. And it doesn’t stop with economics: There’s also better health, less depression, and happier and healthier children to consider. At the end of his piece, Caplan calls being single a “luxury" good. But it’s not exactly an aspirational one.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The 4B movement will not change America because it will be embraced by an extremely small number of people who all come from subcultures with South Korea-tier fertility already.
It's also, as far as anyone can tell, not the cause of Korea's uniquely low fertility, because Korea's fertility is not uniquely low. It's on the low end of average for the region; Japan is actually an outlier up for developed East Asian fertility. Taiwan, the PRC, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore all have extremely low fertility and South Korea is on the lower end of average among that group. Not an outlier. The real question is 'what is Japan doing so right to have nearly double South Korea's fertility rate?' not 'why is South Korea's fertility so low?'.
And why developed East Asian countries have such low fertility rates is mostly known- they're highly urban places which generally have non-abrahamic religions which they barely practice in an ultra-competitive society in which childhood sucks. People don't like putting kids through hell, and South Korean and Chinese childhoods are hellacious. Strivers the world over generally have lower fertility rates, and everyone in these countries is a striver. Add incredibly dense urbanism and the lack of religious influence to raise fertility, it's not that hard to explain.
some of the strongest advocates for gun rights are men who have never and would never [intentionally put themselves in a position to need to] fire shots in anger
The abortion rights debate is literally just a mirror of the gun rights one (especially if you accept the progressive framing that "nobody deserves to die by someone defending themselves over property, because all fetuses criminals are conceived? born innocent and literally couldn't help but being a burden on society"- complete with 'future lawyer or doctor' applying word for word).
Are you just trying to control women?
Are the motives for gun control initiatives primarily conducted with the end goal of controlling men?
They're certainly couched in "protecting innocent children from evil men is worth the violence risk", and so the abortion initiatives have learned to take the same tack (protecting innocent children from evil women is worth the rape risk).
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1hr ago
Sexually successful men dont hate women, they just don't treasure them, and treat them how [sexually successful] women treat men; as disposable.
I guess it depends on what you mean by hate. "I hate you personally and want to hurt you" is pretty rare, but "I consider you to be a disposable object to be used, and your feelings on the matter are irrelevant because you're not really even a person" is a kind of contempt near enough to hate as to make little difference.
Abusive men don't hate women, they hate the world and women just can't resist being around them for some mysterious reason.
I think some abusive men are just misanthropists who hate the world and take it out on those they can (which are most often their partners and children), but some abusive men definitely do hate women and take out their lack of success (sexual and otherwise) on them.
Or by "men who hate women" does she mean that don't soyfully agree with generic feminist talking points? I once ended a relationship over watching The Imitation Game, of all things. "Ah, here's Kiera Knightly reprising her role as a modern woman trapped in the past" was apparently such a hateful comment that it got me a continuous diatribe about women's suffrage until I flat-out got up and left. I wonder if that was proof that I hated women.
I dunno man, but you have so many of these anecdotes, the punchline always being that a woman rejected you for inexplicable and irrational feminine reasons (usually relating to you talking about how much you resent all things female). Do you actually like women? I mean as people, not as things you want to fuck? Pardon the blunt phrasing, but that is kind of what the "men who hate women" construct is getting at. I sometimes hear men who clearly despise women deny it and say that of course they love women, when what they really love is sex with women, and the fact that there is a woman involved in the process seems to be an annoyance to them.
Yep, that's what people were colloquially (and maybe even officially, I don't remember) calling the day all restrictions were set to be lifted. I don't recall any limitations being re-imposed after that. I admit that for a while if you tested positive for covid you were still required to self-isolate for 10-14 days, but I wouldn't call that hysteria.
Prominent health officials were arguing for re-establishing some level of restrictions around the time of the Omicron variant but Boris Johnson overrode them on that.
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