2D3D
29d ago
Propaganda about female infidelity while men die in the trenches is as old as language has been invented. Even now there are constant jokes about Navy wives being Coastie girlfriends, and thats peacetime. This propaganda is more for internal consumption of the propaganda generator (look how stupid they are for continuing to fight us!) instead of the propaganda receiver.
I also think 'residents want to part of russia anyways' is pretty disingenuous. Slovyansk and Mariupol both told Russia to fuck off, not to mention Odessa and Kharkiv. Crimea, meaning Sevastapol only, is about the only case where arguing for Russian loyalty is possible, since Donestk and Luhansk needed Little Green Men to invade. Nevertheless, Donestk and aluhansk likely hold little love for Kyiv, so Novorissiya is still extant.
The simple fact is that Ukrainians aren't fighting for NATO, they're fighting to not he Russia. There is direct evidence of how Russia treated its holdings in Ukraine, with Mariupol being a wasteland and torture centers being set up in Kherson. One can readily calculate that while the west may be hypocrites, the Russians will not be kind masters as weirdly envisioned by anti-progressives.
2D3D
30d ago
Its not Noticing when the writers state their worldview upfront. You pointed out the two young leads as white and black, yes, but the last lead is a white man... who in the very first scene of the show has his black daughter front and center with him.
It is obvious to Hollywood that there is a deliberate attempt from inside the house to promote blackness, but it is more about reputation laundering than encouraging women to seek black men (dogfart does far more work on that front).
The real dissonance stems from the incongruity of blacks occupying primarily high status and competence positions in modern hollywood portrayals when doing a single Google search on a Name when crime is committed in real life shows where the true disparity lies.
2D3D
4d ago
If your intention is to experience the more salacious nighttime entertainments in Malaysia/Singapore, you have to set aside your expectation of a Soi Cowboy style bargirls spilling into the sidewalk, and know how to navigate the red light scene. The influences of East Asian courtesan style entertainments permeate throughout everywhere the Chinese/Korean/Japanese diaspora has a presence, and the manifestations especially in Singapore are truly unfindable anywhere else.
There are a few extremely interesting nightlife entertainment options that are not commonly experienced by westerners, so I think it is worth sharing the mechanics of Southeast Asian seediness with the fine denizens of themotte. The experiences described below are rated on three variables: Engagement, Play, Damage. Engagement is how much of a conversation/activity you can have with the girl, like if you're on a date. Includes conversation, flirting, playing bar games, having the girl pour your drinks or sing or dance for you. Basically the geisha/courtesan experience. Low engagement is basically when the girl is a meat mannequin, high engagement is the full GirlFriend Experience, whereby it is what loveless guys imagine: a girl waits hand on foot to compliment him for how awesome he is and sympathize with every slight he complains about. Play refers to the amount of physical hanky panky allowed. Low play is sitting side by side, stroking of extremities and handholding (how lewd), medium play is light fondling and sitting on laps, and high play is full on snogging and groping, pretty much first base. Full play is third base and above, in the venue so be prepared for some public action if you're in a full play joint with friends. Damage refers to price. Low is around 50/hour, and at the higher end you are looking at 600/h, not including additional expenditures you may incur of your 'own' volition. More on that at the end
BROTHELS The most obvious is the literal Red Light Brothels. In Geylang they are in the even numbered 'Lorongs', which are on the southern side of the main road and restricted to the earlier numbers (Lor 6, 8, 14, etc). These legal brothels are literally marked with red lanterns, usually with a man lounging outside shooting the shit with other guys. Be warned that there are chinese temples interspersed with the houses that have red trim on the shrines, and these places are not open for business. The working girls here provide purely sexual services, and it is an extremely upfront transaction: you go in, you see the girls in the fishtank (no more glass walls like Thailand, they're just out in the open), and select one to go up to the rooms. If you are unhappy with the selection you can ask the headman for the catalogue, the girls are arranged by nationality so some neighbouring houses may have a girl more suited to your preference. Don't expect too much vibing, these are purely sexual services. If you step into a house without ordering, you won't be harassed or otherwise disturbed, but the headmen will clue others in if there is a tourist just eyeballing, and entry may be refused. No engagement, full play, damage is low to medium depending on the girl.
MASSAGE PARLOURS Because there are plenty of legit parlours, patrons of special service parlours should seek these out at specific locales, particularly Peoples Park and Orchard Towers (the four floors of whores). The obvious sign of the girls will be young women with too much makeup and tight dresses with long fingernails inviting you for a massage. If you find an attractive woman in slacks and a polo t inviting you for a massage, it will be a real one and you would find a very different form of relief following the session. Like the brothels, these massage parlours are fairly straightforward affairs. Select, go in, get it done. Little engagement, pure play. Damage is slightly less than the brothels because these are strictly speaking illegal.
BARGIRLS Hunting grounds for working girls looking for itinerant businessmen unconcerned about fidelity. These are typically filipino bars operating in Lucky Plaza and Circular Road. Though there are plenty of working girls at the various hotels in Orchard Road, these girls typically are prearranged on telegram groups these days and not open for solicitation. The filipino bargirls usually are professional working girls, but often you will find domestic helpers or white/pink collar women having a side gig on weekend nights. These are the establishments where you sit in the bar area with other patrons and have the bargirls chat you up to buy more drinks. High engagement, but very little play on station. Damage on site is medium because these girls are great at convincing you to huy many many drinks to keep them by your side
INDIAN DANCE BARS These are a rather unique feature catering to professional NRIs who have been excluded from other venues due to complaints from working girls about dealing with Indians. The patrons sit on couches surrounding dance platforms, and girls come in to dance to Bollywood hits. Depending on how well you tip the girl may come sit with you and engage in conversation, but there are many platforms and other patrons. Girls stay at each platform for one song before moving to another, averaging 4 songs per shift before retiring for another set of girls to dance and the first batch either rests or sits with a high tippet. The girls are largely hindi speakers because of the makeup of NRIs with the cash to burn - tamils in Singapore and KL can take advantage of local tamil connections to indulge in other entertainments otherwise barred. Due to this specific market dynamic, the demand is surprisingly inelastic and girls can choose to ignore a man even if he tips aggressively. Between the heavies on station and aggressive police presence nearby (at least for Singapore), unruly patrons dont get to stay unruly for long, so the girls make bank. Low to medium engagement, very low to medium play, surprisingly high damage - the tips stack up quick.
KTV This is where things get interesting. Ignore the family friendly venues where you drunkenly belt out hits from your teenage years with your friends for that sweet hit of nostalgia to fend off the advancing years. These KTVs are where the girls make every effort to make you feel like a young man again while draining your wallet to make you as poor as a young man as well. These places are everywhere and at the same time invisible. A local is necessary to navigate to find these bars with opaque windows and negotiate with the door bitches, but it is quite the experience. Upon entry you and your buddies are guided to a private room, then the mamasan will bring out a selection of available girls to entertain you. The job of these girls is to get money out of you in one of twp ways: directly paying them for how much fun they provide you, or playing drinking games with you to both drink your booze and make you finish your booze more quickly. And these girls are good at both: the modern courtesan experience, where the girls alternate between singing and dancing for you， to aggressively challenging you to games of liars dice whereby the losers drink, to sitting on your lap and stroking your hair while you sob about why your boss isn't giving you your promotion and topping up your cups every few minutes. Then at the right moment they will put your hand on an appropriate body part and let you start feeling like you're going somewhere... only for the notorious butterfly system to kick in. See, these girls aren't exclusive to you during the 4 hour shift, there may (or may not) be other patrons who also enjoy the charms of your selected girl, and these girls flit between rooms akin to a butterfly. All the better to whet the appetite and loosen the wallet. The girls typically are mandarin speakers, so looking for an english conversant one can be difficult. Thankfully the language of lust is purely physical, and for everything else wechat autotranslate lets them tell you how much money they are demanding of you. Virgin punters are easily taken advantage of, and it is necessary to get the mamasan to reign in her girls. If one has no favourites, it is best to get the mamasan to determine payouts, otherwise the girls are aggressive double dippers and will try to convince you to pay them separately from the mamasans. As a fun note, the snacks in these establishments always feature the infamous fruit platters, a shitty collection of cheap cut local fruits that somehow go for fifty to a hundred bucks a pop. Baffling till you realize this is how entertainment budgets allow for this type of expense to be charged to the company - the fruit platters are the mamasans take for her to distribute. Engagement is medium to very high (depending on your own level of game), play is medium to high, and damage is medium to high, or even Catastrophic - more on that later
THAI DISCO/SIAM DIU This is the cleanest yet most damaging sleazy establishment. Like an Indian dance club, the girls are on a stage to sing and dance before the tips determine which patron ends up winning their affection for the (partial?) shift. Unlike the Indian dance clubs, where girls rapidly rotate between the small platforms to get each set of couches to tip aggressively, these girls on stage get bidded on like prize horses. And like prize horses, bidding gets crazy. A runner collects money from bidding patrons who signify the amount they are paying and the pin number of the girl they are interested in. During the 'award ceremony' after the sets, the girls get garlands or sashes draped across them like mardi gras beads, signifying how much they are earning. Each garland starts at 50 bucks, up to 25k. Did you notice I said earning, even though I said bidding earlier? Thats because this isn't an auction, its a bet. The amount a punter puts into the pot only lets the girl know he's in play, but the winner is whoever tilts the hardest. When the alcohol flows and a popular girl flits between two or three high rollers in a shift, things can go nuts towards the end. I've seen bidding wars have a girl get competing bids of 10 12 15 20 25 30k in a single session, with the runners frantically rushing back and forth to scan QR payment codes and drape increasingly lavish flower garlands on the girls. All this just for the girl to sit with you and chat you up, mainly so you can rub it in another mans face that you've been better at draining your companies bank account than he is. No play on site, but you are guaranteed to bring her home for the night if the damage exceeds 10k (yes the threshold is that high). Engagement is low to medium, play is low, damage is a binary of low or catastrophic. Thai discos are magic money draining pits. Magic money draining however happens not only at the venues themselves, for many girls - especially the thais- fancy themselves shamans. By the magic of a sob story and promises of exclusivity, a girl who obtains your phone number will cast these spells incessantly to drain you of all your funds and any lines of credit as well. Many men have fallen under the sway of these girls, and a single night of 300 can be the gateway for tens to hundreds of thousands to disappear into an abyss.
A circumspect man with his head screwed on tight will be able to experience exotic entertainments without losing everything, but everything can be lost if the right spell lands.
Singapore has a rather staid reputation, deservedly earned relative to the insanity one can experience in Bangkok, Pattaya or Batam. Yet the febrile sleazy scene, guarded by conscript police and a political establishment unbeholden to moral grandstanding has allowed an extremely robust commercial sex sector to thrive, without the stain of organized gangs and it's consequent violence blighting the land.
Oh and for other touristy crap, just stick to the good hawkers near train stations. Maxwell, Amoy, Old Airport Road and Chinatown Complex are the top tier hawkers and the internet recommendations are generally quite accurate.
2D3D
28d ago
The left does not want working class involvement, they want working class buy-in. The presence of the working class as adherents serves to launder the appeal of DEI paeans, hence the lumping of 'class economics' as a reason to support DEI on the surface. NPR like NYT serves as a sanity washing machine, packaging untenable ideas with somewhat reasonable or appealing ones and textdrowning readers in softly persuasive language to slowly edge the overton window one article at a time.
2D3D
28d ago
The curling into a fetal surrender position is quite comfortable. The teacher in Batley is still in hiding, the groveling of the West Yorkshire mum is still on full display to see, and lets not get started on the lack of consequences for the grooming gangs. I would say the UK establishment and population are indeed quite comfortable with one particular religion, and will continue to be salami sliced as the London elite gaslight Norf FC gammons that this isn't happening and Noticing is proof of their systemic racism.
2D3D
28d ago
Its easy to put your kid in a terrible school, its difficult to keep them there if you have the choice. Mommy forums back in 2020 were filled with anxieties about Covid affecting school choices and whether their precious darlings were going to be stuck in 'bad' schools. Liberal truisms about 'all kids are equal' tend to wither in the face of discipline realities in 'urban' schools.
2D3D
22d ago
Freedom of association is impossible in an 'equity' focused social order. What you're describing is exactly what Redlining was, and the modern incarnation of crime map overlays on Zillow was axed precisely because it was 'disequitable'.
2D3D
29d ago
Similarly you have no moral right to decry people who wish to fight against an aggressor. This presumption that being Russian beats dying in a ditch is a tautology. Perhaps there is a state where you don't die in a ditch, having fought off the Russians. Perhaps there is a state that you have died in a ditch for nothing and Russia reigns supreme forever. But presuming an inevitable Russian victory as the starting point for discussion betrays biases that colour all points made downstream.
The point remains that people have choice: Ukraine govt chose to fight against Russia, Western govt chose to support a degree of that fight, and Russia agreed to fight against a mildly empowered enemy. Screeching 'just surrender you Ukrainian stooges' is insulting, just as it is insulting to scream 'just surrender you Palestinian puppets'.
2D3D
7hr ago
Strictly speaking the dynastic quality of Lee Kuam Yew to Lee Hsien Loong is clouded by Goh Chok Tongs equally unremarkably competent 'seatwarmer' Prime Ministership of 14 years, which is no small quantum of years save for the long tenures of LKY and LHL to stand as contrasts. Detractors point to an early health scare in LHLs career as the reason for extending GCTs PM tenure, but other commentators note that LKY would not have allowed an incompetent son to be in a political leadership position. I leave it to readers to determine whether LHL is a nepo baby inheriting a position he did not earn or a man groomed from high school to helm a thankless position. I for one err towards LHL doing a fair job of unclenching his fathers grasped fist on Singapore only to replace it with his own everpresent guiding hand.
As for Lawrence Wong, it is fair to say that he is less charismatic than the other leaders we are used to, but to be frank Singaporeans do not really trust charisma. Old guard oratory opposition firebrands like Joshua Benjamin Jeyaratnam and Chee Soon Juan were unable to rally the populace to their cause of freeing Singapore from Lee Kuan Yews harsh view of society and the world, and modern sweet talkers like Jamus Lim are viewed by the polity as soft idealists who will fold when push comes to shove. In short, the relative lack of charisma is not a shortcoming for PM Wong. Why Singaporeans are unreceptive to charisma is likely a combination of successful government propaganda about being wary of false prophets but also a brutal calculus by even the educated population who view politics as something best left as a topic of complaint and not a cause to rally against.
One can readily observe that Singaporean politicians are overwhelmingly senior civil servants and military generals (who are basically civil servants in the Singaporean administration), and my personal view is that save for extremely few egoists the vast majority of politicians are simply guys who got asked by their boss to take up the role of politician. Singapores political administration, especially in the Lawrence Wong cabinet, is a cabinet of civil servants forced to the top. Is being forced to the top bad? For these men, yes it is. Singaporean civil servants often command far higher salaries than politicians, and the educational pedigrees of these politicians certainly puts paid to accusations of incompetence-blind nepotism. This chart below is a snapshot of the difference between Singapore and Malaysia: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Y5CGZO4eQBY/TQS1sT9gTrI/AAAAAAAAChQ/7X-cnkUP7yE/s1600/Singapore+Vs+malaysia+Politic+2007-Final.jpg
It is a common observation in the Admin Service - the elite civil servants, recipients of extremely competitive scholarships that allow Singaporean kids of even modest income to massively overrepresent at all elite universities - that it is better to rise to Director or Deputy Permanent Secretary of a major ministry, than it is to become a member of parliament. It is an easier career progression path and salaries are inevitably higher than junior politicians, much less the eye watering salaries admin service scholars can command when they jump to MBB or FAANG - typically 0.3m is the starting salary for jumpers who go straight to VP or higher, compared to Admin Service deputy directors (the typical jumping point) who command 0.15m at that juncture.
All this is to reinforce the point that for these men of means and brains, there are much better opportunities for self enrichment than being a politician. Between a blisteringly robust private sector and an extremely aggressive Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau which set its sights on a prominent minister, there is little opportunity for a politician to self enrich and better opportunities outside the cosy confines of the civil service-politocian pipeline. As an extreme example, one of the main Prime Minister prospectives, George Yeo, lost his seat in 2011 and 'retired' to be director of multiple major conglomerates both in Singapore and overseas. Rest assured that he is making 4x the money for 1/2 the effort as when he was a minister.
So what does this mean for Lawrence Wong? Well, it means that he is, in effect, a chump. His boss told him 'I need you to take over' and like a good boy he said 'yes sir'.
https://www.theonion.com/black-man-given-nations-worst-job-1819570341
(He isn't black, but the point still stands)
PM Wong is certainly not a deer in the headlight about to be run over. If not LW then others in the cabinet would have been picked, notably Chan Chun Sing who is bafflingly removed from the new executive core despite his immense popularity among everyone that worked with him - maybe looking like a 20 year old boy trying to fit into his dads suit harms him more than even the voting populace thinks. The Singapore civil service is, by this point, a well tuned machine churning out remarkably competent administrators and bureaucrats who have proven competent at navigating their institutions away from ruin. Perhaps that is the best placeholder government a society can hope for, a solid ship well maintained till a visionary captain finds his hands at the helm. Till then, the bureaucrat-politicians of Singapore will navigate as best they can, which honestly seems like a better deal than what the rest of us (globohomo retards time-capsuled in 2012 liberalism that we are) have to go through.
2D3D
23d ago
Bayarea is a notably young subreddit, as that whole website is. If anything this is a new crop of normies emerging, having seen the consequences of the soft touch and unwilling to continue blindly down this evidently rocky path to the progressive future. There is usually an interesting splitting of subreddits in regionals, with sanfrancisco and bayareahating each other just as seattle and seattlewa or publicfreakout and actualpublicfreakouts or unitedkingdom and ukpolitics all hate each other for being pussies and racists respectively. The split has been getting worse over time, likely because of the increasingly visible failures of progressives. Should be fun to see these spirals continue and see which side the banhammer falls on. Gendercritical got axed, but so did chapotraphouse
2D3D
27d ago
Maybe he's just viewed as the crazy uncle you tell the kids not to talk to? Every family already has that guy and it's hardly a stretch that a family as sprawling as the Kennedys would have bad apples the batch prefer isolated. They did lobotomize one of their own after all.
2D3D
28d ago
Re beauty: Kurt is good looking by our western-media influenced standards, but the locals are acting with a fairly common hospitality extended towards unthreatening transients. Some of his baseline attractiveness is compounded by exoticism, but the locals are hardly treating him like their gracious god has entered their midst. If you want to see deference to beauty in Vietnam, put a kpopped oppa or unnie in their midst; that'll get you blonde-in-Varanasi level attention.
Nevertheless, it is true that Kurt is not 'ugly' and thus automatically distrusted, and it is interesting to examine the reasons for that: Across all cultures male and female beauty are associated with certain common factors:
- Neoteny (young people aren't as unhealthy as old fogeys)
- Facial symmetry (deformities are indication of poor health or genetic defect)
- Physical robustness (can act as an inverse to 1) depending on specific societal preferences for sexual predilections but cripples and mutants usually aren't seen as attractive)
- Sexual presentation conformity (including twinks/catamites/hirja/eromenos/bacha etc etc). This is more for ease of knowing the local cultural dynamic so the interactions within the high-context culture are immediately outlined, but it still matters.
There are of course a large variety of ostensibly common cultural values that tend to flow depending on specific economic and geographical considerations, notably fat=wealthy and pale=professional, but those factors are also influenced by a dynamic cultural environment shaped by competing social value vectors.
It has been scientifically proven multiple times, that attractiveness has strong value. Meaning, the opposites of the above 4 values I outlined have strong NEGATIVE value. There are extremely racist statements, perhaps too spicy for even this board to state openly, that especially highlight why some races especially value White and East Asian phenotypes - greater obvious dimorphism is the sole point I will state explicitly, for fear of offending even the toughened skins of mottizens.
That conspiracy exists, in its declaration that there is no Noble Physiognomy, and our attractions are just manipulated by White Supremacy
Playing into the culture war angle, it is quite obvious that there are strong attempts to promote weird plainly ugly features, and this is clearly less about raising the attractiveness of ugly people than it is about lowering the standards of what is considered beautiful. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjq99z/why-cant-my-famous-gender-nonconforming-friends-get-laid https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42652947 The entire clown show of NB redditors posting themselves in dresses and asking for updoots. Its too mean to crosspost here, but its pretty sad.
Anyways, the point is that the modern culture war DOES have elements of deliberate celebrating of nonattractiveness, but their lack of sexual fulfilment is not a front being fought in this war. This circles back to a relatively common observation, that this is bitter losers in the sexual marketplace attempting to diminish sexual market value of attractive people in order to level the playing field out of spite. Ultimately, there are plenty more people who perceive themselves as losers rather than winners in the sexual marketplace hence why entities keep trying to put their finger on the scale. Whether we as consumers/participants in the marketplace Notice is the concurrent battle being waged as well.
2D3D
30d ago
The boning is a player reward for cashing out an emotional investment, not the conclusion of a plotted story point. I blame immersiveness, specifically the transposition of the player into the third person avatar, as the root cause of most narrative weakness in the highly variable and interactive videogame medium. The necessity of respecting player agency disincentivizes railroading, while keeping plots coherent requires branching paths. 'Play the game your way' necessarily means that the player has a strong chance to blow up a really compelling plotline with major consequences. Killing Caesar in Fallout New Vegas should be an immensely consequential decision, but it makes 0 difference beyond some vague dialogue changes at the end of the game. The very nature of videogames as an interactive medium means developers are forced into 'respecting' player agency even if agency results in shitty stories and shitty action. (for example Bioshock is famously railroaded and ends up having only a single narrative path snd is all the better for it, and we have already expounded on the failures of DAI and ME elsewhere in this thread)
In the end though, I do think that most videogame writers were also given a really free reign to write whatever the hell they wanted because most people didn't bother with narration. I could play marathon or doom or jazz jackrabbit or wolfenstein with only twitch reflexes activated and skip through all the cutscenes, since my dopamine hit comes from blowing up the obvious bad guys. In a narrative focused game, the dopamine hit is the denouement of the characters invested struggle, and that just brings the weaknesses of writing to the fore.
2D3D
2d ago
Asian racism cannot compare to the promise of being with an American, and even if 90 out of 100 girls view your black skin as pure vileness there will be 10 girls who want to get their freak on with what daddy hates most.
2D3D
19d ago
I find the bigger problem is that our friends tend to be more fickle than we calculated. True friendships are a tribe unto themselved, sufficiently bonded to ignore external cultural variations. Either your friends aren't so close that they are willing to censure you over inconsequential opinions, or they're weaklings who can't stand up against Current Thing. Both lead to the same conclusion of 'get better friends'. Difficult, but just like a good romantic relationship, worth it
2D3D
23d ago
It just points to the shallowness of these friendships. Others downthread point to the many charitable reasons people may choose to abandon their self-interest, such as @2rafa citing naivete and @FirmWeird citing personal growth, but you wouldn't have to abandon it if your friends had your own interests at heart. The progressive constantly eats its own as the cause celebre changes, and the it is simply the Jews turn on the chopping block once again. Black men, Hispanic men, Asians, and White Gays will be on back the block soon enough.
2D3D
2d ago
Video games became irrepairably damaged when FMV cutscenes became more than cheesy mid mission rewards, and when Metal Gear Solid became an interactive movie. The gameplay loop should be the point, not the opportunity to see a badly rendered aerith get stabbed followed by a yellow polygon shaking irascibly.
2D3D
2d ago
paid parasocial entertainment isn't really a thing in the western world,
Superior western capitalism has commodified thottery into cashapp and snaps. Parasocial relationships, without even needing to leave the house.
2D3D
1mo ago
I have acted as the Indian Aunty to matchmake/gatekeep for my desi brother (UK born, Indian, Doctor, absolutely shit useless with women), so let me (not) assure you: the Indian aunties in the UK are recommending socially reclused mummys girls whose lives are intertwined with their mothers at the hip, or these girls have run through their address book and are finally willing to accept their parents request for a Nice Indian Boy.
These arent necessarily bad things, the girls tend to not be psychotic, but I will say that the passivity of all the girls is infuriating even for socially functional desi men. Something about the NRI cultural experience demands that the men take the active lead in all aspects, with little feedback mechanism for what constitutes a successful interaction. As the Matchmaker, I have received endless complaints from the mothers about the lack of Interaction from my brother, so if you decide to pursue those paths, do note the pitfall.
On the other hand, their passivity and your relative bargaining power (articulate Good Indian Boy with medical degree) means you can set the tone entirely. Depending on your shamelessness you can use these girls as your mandatory partner in exploring the London gastronomic scene or as sounding boards for your gushing at the wonders of the Bovington tank museum.
Finally, buxom blondes tend to come with uncertain mass distribution curves. Be prepared for disappointment should you make footfall in the West.
2D3D
22d ago
Those warning labels are so vague as to be insultingly trite. Impaired brain development/functionality can just be post coital sleepiness, heightened demand for sexual services can just be normal sex stuff... this is almost insulting.
2D3D
23d ago
Ego satiation doesn't put food on the table. Once there material wealth was present for the taking, the infighting crippled the movement. The BLM formal organization milked the feel-good donations dry before collapsing, immediately calling the general public racist for not continuing to support Buy Large Mansions. While the grifter and the do-gooder may be seperate bodies, neither side manages to get their preferred outcome.
2D3D
23d ago
My standing thesis is that the Congressional Progressive Caucus successfully convinced Bidens team that the momentum of BLM was permanent and that the CPC as the champion/stewart of BLM was on the ascendancy. A few specific events lent credence to this calculus in the early days of Bidens presidency such as Stacey Abrahms mobilizing Georgia for Biden and the Senate, and the Rittenhouse trial among other BLM items made the CPC advocacy seem relevant and thus their political power was enshrined. Opponents to the CPC like Abigail Spanberger and Obama and consultants such as Ruy Texiera and James Carville have repeatedly complained that the progressives still have too much influence, and tbat is squarely aimed at the CPC.
Minor setbacks like Jayapal being smacked for advocating Ukraine 'negotiate' seemed to dull some of the CPC influence, but the CPC has always been explicitly pro palestinian. With youth support for pro palestine being more visible than AIPACs feeble efforts to change public perception of voters, Biden is beholden to the CPC if only to maintain a pretense of strength to the wider electorate.
2D3D
27d ago
Colonization in India occurred not because a few god-like white people showed up and crushed all before them, but instead because very clever and ruthless opportunists, through a combination of skill and luck, managed to co-opt local power structures by backing challengers to weak overlords
This is often downplayed because it places the burden of modern societal failures away from the evil whites who came in and stole everything. If my country continues to be a failure it is better for the leader to externalize all blame as much as possible, and even better if the blamed entity is besotted by internal tensions promoting reparations instead of reprisals. There is no blood to be squeezed from the hardened hearts of modern Arabs or Serbs who colonized Egypt, or the Bantus that drove the Khoisan to the edge.
The incentive to eternally blame whites is to keep the spotlight away on exploitable past transgressions, not on modern failures. If focus is turned onto how local polities collaborated with the colonizers, the question arises of where the spoils reaped by these collaborators went
2D3D
28d ago
VoA is high quality precisely because it is bound by mandate to not broadcast to Americans. Its a bit anodyne and obviously fully asspuppeted by the State Department, but it is honestly refreshing to read articles about international issues and how it relates to US interests without the stink of culture war blanketing the presentation.
SEX AND THE BIG CITY
or
THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE
In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.
This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.
https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context
So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.
This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.
In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.
So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.
Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.
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