07mk
27d ago
The problem is that some differences certainly aren't, but that doesn't mean other differences aren't. The questions here would be: (1) which characteristics of Iranian society/culture would need to change and how, for Iran to "turn into Afghanistan" as is meant by that statement here (presumably culturally/socially/governmentally or the like, rather than literally or demographically), and (2) are those changes within the bounds of what is possible in a population made of people who we would genetically categorize as "Persian."
Unfortunately, I feel like our level of knowledge on this kind of thing is akin to Archimedes's level of knowledge of orbital dynamics and special relativity. We just haven't done the (potentially centuries' worth of required) scientific work to actually gain meaningful insight into this.
07mk
27d ago
Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions. Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do. If you're less happy in a free society, that's on you for overeating or being an asshole or choosing to gamble or whatever stupid shit you do.
This is one of those things that seems obvious, but also seems like it's not talked about nearly enough, to the extent that people actually don't understand it as obvious. I certainly wish the feminist movement talked more about these downsides and the fact that many women will end up less happy (and, quite possibly, less good for whatever they might judge as "good" in terms of their life), but that this is a worthy cost to pay for the freedom that feminism offers them. Because, right now, I see so many women being failed by the feminist movement, having been convinced that freedom won't have these severe and significant downsides and then conclude that their own lack of happiness despite their freedom means that the movement clearly needs to keep doing more until morale improves somehow both greater freedom and greater happiness is achieved. Without that grounding in actual reality - and the tradeoffs that are always present in reality - it's become a movement that just keeps inviting greater and greater justified pushback while leaving its supporters dissatisfied.
Of course, the market movement can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent alive, and there's a sucker born every minute, so its inability to - and apparent lack of desire to - accomplish its stated goals doesn't mean that there's going to be some correction anytime soon.
07mk
27d ago
But that doesn’t justify looksmaxxing to the extreme lengths some of these people go to. You can agree that looks are important without devoting thousands of hours to going from an 8 to an 8.5, for example. That is not a simple way to make bone smashing or leg lengthening necessarily rational.
I'm reminded of a line in some Op Ed (NYTimes or Boston Globe, IIRC) I read in early 2000s, where some Republican pundit was justifying his push back against president Bush, in part by saying something like, "When the car you're in has veered sharply to the right towards a cliff, the proper thing to do isn't to turn the wheel back to neutral; it's to turn it sharply back to the left." Looksmaxxing to the point of self-surgery like in Gattaca seems extreme to a demented extent, but it's a response to what I perceive as an environment in which the idea that looks don't matter at all has become the only allowable opinion to be expressed, to the extent that a significant portion of the population of those environments have decided to believe it, as expressed by their behaviors in terms of looks with respect to romance.
07mk
27d ago
Either they're neuro-divergent to the point of suicidal credulity (in which case I don't trust that you actually read society's message correctly, there are implicit messages), very young or are actively in denial. Someone like Lindy West or the fat acceptance types are not unaware of their lower status, they reject it and reject anything that could fix it because they've decided a political situation is the only moral one. I suppose you can say that the last group were brainwashed into it but they're not ignorant. They're willfully opposed and you have to know what you're fighting to fight it.
This seems like just a semantic argument. Yes, these people are "aware" of these things happening, but, like you say, they "reject" it, because it's "immoral." Part of that rejection is the "suicidal credulity" and "denial," which causes them to lack an understanding of the fact that the reality of some fat acceptance type having "low status" due to their fatness is something that you can't rout society around through wishful thinking and bullying, at least not longer than the emperor can walk around naked before some kid asks why. I think that they don't know that their model of sexual attraction in society is useless in the face of the underlying reality, as evidenced by their behavior which leads to self-suffering, shows that they're still missing some core knowledge about how the "sexual marketplace [as] the manosphere describes" is accurate
But there's only so far you can get with the argument that people are this ignorant, that they think Chris Hemsworth takes his shirt off because women are attracted to Aussies.
The actual factually inaccurate but morally right explanation is that the only reason Hemsworth's good body attracts women is that women have been hopelessly brainwashed to value those things (similarly to how men have been hopelessly brainwashed to value youth, skinniness, etc. in women), and that simply freeing them from the brainwashing would make women exactly as attracted to Danny Devito as to Chris Hemsworth if their personalities were the same (similarly to how simply freeing men from the brainwashing would make them exactly as attracted to Oprah Winfrey as to Sydney Sweeney if their personalities were the same - that this hasn't happened indicates that we must free them even harder from their oppressive brainwashing that they cling on to so hard). This kind of thinking is basically universal in most Blue tribe environments I've been in (which has been roughly 3.5 decades in a row now), due to many Blue tribe environments enforcing this ignorance through heavy censure of any sort of inquisitiveness or curiosity at analyzing the situation (in a way that isn't intentionally biased in order to arrive at the Morally Right conclusions).
07mk
27d ago
Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort.
Everyone already knows this.
That's not true, though, unless you're using some sort of "subconsciously know in a way that is directly contradictory to their behavior, their words, and their conscious beliefs" meaning of "knows" here. We have vast swathes of the population who genuinely believe that the part quoted above is merely the delusions of old, crusty, conservative ignoramuses who don't understand the Correct Feminist way that romantic relationships actually work among humans. The existence of these vast swathes who don't know this is pretty much why incels have become a noticeable issue at all in the culture wars.
07mk
28d ago
The primary argument by opponents to such a policy is that everyone who has the legal right to vote ought to have the option to have their vote counted, and this policy would place a burden on those who have the right but lack a government-issued ID for whatever reason. There are many other arguments surrounding this, but this is the core point that all their arguments come down to.
The issue here is that the muddling of the message is the point, and encoded in that above interaction is the clear message: "figure it out yourself [the first step of which is to ignore everything my peers and I tell you to do and learn to think for yourself]." Women want men who can figure things out for themselves, and the only way to discriminate between men who do and don't is to give them a hard, confusing, self-contradictory problem and then see which ones figure out the answer.
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