Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
11hr ago
Terrorist bombing campaigns were more a feature of the Troubles than of the War of Independence. The IRA of the era largely favoured guerrilla warfare tactics, in which their combatants (in plain clothes) would assassinate a police officer or British spy and then melt into the crowds. In the Wikipedia article about the War of Independence, the word "bomb" only appears five times, one of which in reference to a Loyalist bombing attack and another to a planned bombing campaign on the British mainland which was never actually carried out. I'm not aware of a single instance of the IRA using any of Hamas's more unsavoury tactics (e.g. child suicide bombers, planting bombs with the deliberate intention of causing mass civilian casualties) during the War of Independence.
Folamh3
17hr ago
STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT
Joking aside I have a real job and music is a passion project I pursue in my spare time.
Folamh3
1d ago
No, not particularly, because as I said above there is an asymmetry between first-mover violence and retaliation.
Which just leads to an endless game of temporal gerrymandering. Israel says that Hamas started the current war on October 7th, ergo Israel is entitled to retaliate. Hamas would have a rather different view of who really started it. Who should we believe? Personally, I'm inclined to lean more towards the Israelis.
Folamh3
1d ago
Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis.
This just seems like a fundamentally dishonest framing. Hamas fires dozens if not hundreds of rockets at Israel every year. These rockets are slapdash affairs with no guidance system to speak of, and the Iron Dome renders most (but not all) of them ineffective. Without the Iron Dome, it's obvious that Israel's casualties would be an order of magnitude higher at least.
Describing Hamas firing hundreds of rockets at Israel (most of which miss or are shot down before they can hurt anyone) as Palestine "de-escalating" the conflict - I mean, really? If you repeatedly shoot at someone, the fact that you're a lousy shot and/or they were wearing full body armour does nothing to exculpate you.
Folamh3
2d ago
I remember being stunned a decade ago seeing a guy bring his huge girlfriend or maybe wife to a cyclist restaurant right at the city limit. They drove there ofc. She was at least twice as heavy as he was and wearing tight fitting clothing.
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She's very lucky not to have a fat face (or at least her makeup is extremely flattering).
Folamh3
2d ago
No argument here. I'm not saying that men who like big girls don't exist (the BBW category on PornHub exists for a reason), I just doubt that they exist in sufficient numbers to significantly move the needle on the rate of loneliness/singledom/inceldom among fat women. Even if dating fat women was effectively "destigmatized", I can't imagine this would have any more than a marginal impact.
Folamh3
2d ago
Having had more than one close friend who struggled with anorexia, this jibes with my experience. At no point did "slimming down in order to become more attractive to men" ever enter into it.
Folamh3
2d ago
I got into a debate with some fat acceptance types on Substack, who were arguing that dating fat people is "stigmatised" i.e. there are lots of people who find fat people very attractive and would very much like to date them, but choose not to because dating fat people is seen as low-status.
I thought this was, frankly, a load of hogwash: fat people have a harder time getting a date because, all things being equal, people find fat people less attractive. I was trying to find this exact article to illustrate my point - the body types that RealDolls are manufactured in are practically the ultimate revealed preference. But I couldn't for the life of me remember what the article was called.
Folamh3
3d ago
Folamh3
3d ago
But Julia was an outlier, and only avoids repercussions by putting on a tremendously convincing performance of the type of woman Winston thinks she is.
To clarify, I've never been reported to the authorities for asking a girl out either. I'm not arguing that any man who's less than maximally attractive who asks out the wrong girl will inevitably end up with his career destroyed and his life in ruins - that's preposterous. I'm merely arguing that there has been a concerted effort among feminists to stigmatise male dating behaviour which would have been seen as perfectly innocuous a generation ago; that the most severe consequences for a social media cancellation campaign can be disastrous for men targeted by them (e.g. the Shitty Media Men List, the more recent "Are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups); and that this produces an inevitable chilling effect on the behaviour of socially awkward men who are aware of the new norms (which is most of them). Much as cancellers cancel people who contradict woke orthodoxy in order to send a message to onlookers, the cancellation of men for being "creepy" (i.e asking out a woman who isn't interested) is intended to send a message to socially awkward men. It may well be that the risk of professional repercussions as a result of a particular socially awkward man asking out the wrong girl are only 1 in 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 - but if the knowledge that he might face these repercussions makes him 10 or even 5% more risk-averse (and if every socially awkward man is making the same calculation) that will have massive knock-on effects on the dating economy, the loneliness/sexlessness epidemic and the fertility rate.
Yes on both counts. The sexual revolution and the free love movement promoted the idea that casual sex should be consequence-free (which that generation of Westerners fully internalised, for the most part) - then technological developments caused social atomisation which actually removed most of the indirect social consequences for bad behaviour among "cads" and "rakes".
It's possible to imagine an alternate history where we had the same technological developments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that we had, but not preceded by the dramatic social liberalisation of the sexual revolution. In this counterfactual world, social atomisation still happens, but sexual misconduct (e.g. impregnating a girl and running off on her) remains so aggressively stigmatised that most men refrain from it of their own accord. What I'm describing actually sounds fairly similar to modern Japan and Korea, in which less than 10% of live births are out of wedlock, as opposed to the West in which they're 30% at the absolute minimum (granted, more abortions are carried out in South Korea than in the US or UK per capita, so it's not quite as rosy as I'm making it out to be).
Folamh3
3d ago
One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.
And because the most determined pro-Palestine activists made sure to tear down all the posters of abducted Israeli children, in an effort to quell the associated cognitive dissonance.
Due to demographic implosion, families and friends' circles are smaller, so your friends and their friends have fewer or no sisters, nieces, cousins and other friends to introduce to you even if they want to help you out.
True. "I married my sibling's friend" was a pretty common route of courtship in generations past, which largely doesn't exist anymore as a result of smaller family sizes.
To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.
Neatly encapsulating why men and women alike complain about all the bad behaviour on dating apps. If there's no overlap in social circles between you and the person you're dating, there are no social consequences for bad behaviour, so feel free to ghost to your heart's content. It's not that the people who use dating apps are necessarily uniquely shitty people, or that dating apps select for people who are uniquely shitty (though both of these are true to some extent, particularly the latter): it's that dating apps don't incentivise people to behave pro-socially.
You're also gesturing at precisely the "social atomisation" thing I'm describing: a few generations ago, asking out a girl with whom you have no overlap in social circles simply wasn't an option. A hundred years ago, if you lived in a town of a few thousand people and tried to ditch a girl after getting her pregnant, her father would be hammering on your front door with a shotgun before the day was out. Nowadays if you do that, she has no recourse.
It does make one rather cynical about human nature when you realise that a lot of people (not a majority or anything, just a lot) are operating on the basis not of "I should treat this girl with respect because it's the right thing to do and it's how I'd like to be treated" but "I should treat this girl with respect, because if I don't she'll tell everyone and it'll come back to bite me in the ass". The sexual revolution is basically a prolonged experiment in what happens when you take away the personal incentive not to be shitty to girls that you want to fuck but don't want to wife.
Well, duh. If you ask them about a RANDOM GUY, of course they'll react like that, because they don't see 'random' guys as attractive.
I don't know if the author would have gotten a different answer if she'd specified "How would you feel if an attractive man you don't know started talking to you in an elevator?"
I think you have your causality backwards. It's not that people don't bother asking people out in person anymore because they'd rather use the apps: it's that Western society has become massively atomised as a result of technological progress, which is a void that the apps have stepped in to inexpertly fill.
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person? Common examples included i) a nice girl you met at church; ii) a colleague at work; iii) a classmate; or iv) a friend of a friend. Why i) is no longer viable is self-explanatory. Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply, and you also run into the problem of a paucity of available women - if you're a socially awkward man in college, odds are good that you're pursuing a degree which is highly sex-segregated (computer science, engineering etc.).
That leaves iv). It's impossible to ask a friend of a friend on a date if a) you don't have any friends, or all of your friends are online friends; or b) all of your friends are people you met through an extremely sex-segregated common interest (Warhammer, D&D, coding, esports, rationalist-adjacent subreddit spinoffs etc.) - something that the internet and social media facilitates far too easily. (People self-segregrating into ideological echo chambers is only the tip of the iceberg: self-segregrating into echo chambers of people who like Obscure Hobby X or want to fuck toasters is the major underlying cause of the demise of any shared monoculture and the enshittification of Western society. I and everyone reading this are guilty of it.)
So you're left with cold approaches: going up to girls in bars or nightclubs. Again, not a problem for charming and socially adept men; big problem for the socially awkward millennials/zoomers you're criticising. Hard to blame them for making a beeline for the apps instead.
Of course it's easy to criticise Millennial and Gen Z adult men for not taking proactive steps to organically encounter single women in real life. Obviously talking to strangers halfway across the globe is not a great way to get laid in real life; nor is spending every day in your local Games Workshop. But the thing is, they didn't make this decision as adults: they made it when their parents gave them a smartphone as teenagers, and all the years of adolescence they should have spent ironing out the kinks in their patter have been squandered watching YouTube and Twitch instead. Gen Z boys are starting college barely more acquainted with the rules of social interaction IRL than Gen X 13-year-olds were, for reasons that are not entirely their fault: no one here thinks someone's life should be ruined because of a stupid decision they made when they were 12, a decision which directly harms only themselves and no one else (but indirectly harms society as a whole, obviously).
And your assumption that dating apps killed traditional courtship hinges on the questionable presumption that Millennial/Gen Z women are exactly as receptive to a stranger asking them out as Gen X women were in their youth. But I don't think they are, and I think the fact that they aren't is part of the problem. See this great article:
I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
See also (coming back to "Untitled" above) innumerable feminist comics about how it's creepy for men to ask a woman out in a coffee shop or in a library or in college or on the third moon of Venus or whatever. There are plenty of women who are far less receptive to being asked out by strangers than their mothers were, and make no secret of that fact. Obviously the women writing these comics don't represent all women, but the men reading and internalising these comics don't necessarily know that, and everyone ends up poorer for it. If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries. The typical "if you're reading it, it's not for you" dynamic.
Folamh3
4d ago
If you emigrate to a country at the age of (say) 61, you are almost certainly going to be a net drain on that country's resources for far longer than you will be a positive contributor, even if you work for a few years.
Folamh3
4d ago
Folamh3
4d ago
I mean, okay, but I was just laughing at that guy's joke. Is it against the rules to say "ha ha, your joke was funny"?
Folamh3
5d ago
Any recommendations for free AI video generators that can generate 1080p footage at 24fps minimum? Preferably ones which can be accessed through a browser and don't require me to install anything.
Folamh3
5d ago
Far Cry 2 did very little for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed 3 and have been meaning to replay it.
I've never heard of Intravenous before, it looks interesting.
I've tried playing SWAT 4 numerous times and invariably give up no later than the fifth or sixth mission. Great game but it is haaaard.
Like that George Carlin bit, that if Jesus was born 40 years ago in the US, Christians would be wearing tiny electric chairs around their necks.
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