Aapje58
6mo ago
It's far from obvious that it's globally beneficial to create a situation where two groups are both underserved and where they each form negative opinions about members of the other group.
Aapje58
6mo ago
When feminists say "porn is exploitative" and "all sex is rape", this dynamic is what they're getting at- the former because it means that women for whom having sex is a job [that pays a wage] now have to compete with free.
This doesn't ring true at all. Many of those feminists are against sex work too.
It seems more based on on the very conservative idea that women need friendship, support and other things from their partner, which require a lot of effort from the man, but that porn teaches men that they can get sex from women without providing these things. Not: "she had sex with me because I put a lot of effort into the relationship", but: "here's your pizza, sex?"
Aapje58
1yr ago
Your definition just rationalizes away success, where if someone gets objectively better outcomes, but their expectations are higher, they somehow aren't doing better because the gap between expectations and outcomes is similar.
Aapje58
1yr ago
Second, I am not a fan of calling people "obsessed" because they argue a position for more than one post.
I wasn't responding to the frequency, but to the way you approach the issue.
For me, mate selection is a rather complex challenge where people with different demands, different (sub)cultures, different skills, etc have to match up. This provides all kinds of challenges and any solution is going to have downsides and upsides. Simply pointing to a thing that is not optimal in some ways, without even recognizing that the very same behavior that produces a disadvantage also brings advantages, is in my view merely a demand for Utopia, which I see as very harmful, as well as not being helpful at all.
It is very far from a holistic view where you actually try to build a workable system and weigh advantages and disadvantages, compared to the alternatives.
For example, when you said that: "I don't think [women] should just be expected to put up with creepy come-ons without protest," I see no recognition at all that a protest may in fact be the wrong solution (at least for certain types of alleged creepiness). Why?
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The perception of what is creepy may be unreasonable. For example, some people seem to believe that this perception is heavily correlated with attractiveness, rather than just behavior, which if true, can be argued to be extremely discriminatory.
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The perception of creepiness may vary so much between people (and possible even for the same person, depending on their mood or such) that saying it to a man may not be a helpful lesson to that person. And if a generic complaint is made, like in the elevator story, yielding to it may just mean that other women don't get come-ons that they desire. Either form of complaint may simply divide men into those who respond in a Pavlovian way (ignore the complaints, because doing so work often enough) and those who simply stop approaching women altogether (as there is no way not to offend some women, unless one stops approaching women altogether). The net effect may be negative for women, especially if the more neurotic men are less likely to be harmful, which is likely. It may even empower bad actors when women have less choice due to men checking out and have to lower their standards.
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Accepting this may reinforce the current narcissistic and individualist culture where people demand that their own desires are met, which can be argued to have many downsides, including a lack of clarity of what both men and women should do and accept to make mate selection work out reasonably well.
Those are just a few examples of challenges that you could have addressed, but instead you merely state your opinion that you believe that a downside is unreasonable, without even arguing why you consider it unreasonable. As such, it is about as informative as 'I like fish.'
This is an obvious straw man, and equally obviously, not what I want either.
It is not at all obvious what you want, because your statements are so shallow. You argue that "it is pretty creepy to ask a woman you're alone in an elevator with late at night to "come back to your room for coffee" unless you have been given prior signals that she might be receptive to such a proposition." However, this is just your personal opinion on the matter. Do you believe that this should be the societal norm? Is it the societal norm? How do you even know to what extent the guy perceived prior signals?
There are scientific studies that argue that people are often very bad at both sending and perceiving subtle signals. Something you never address. You just assume. Perhaps she smiled at him and then put her hand through her hair, in the same way that some women do to signal. However, this time it was not intentional, but how could he know?
Do you want to standardize the signals or make them very explicit? If we do not, then shouldn't women accept that men will quite often misjudge?
What I see you do is merely empathizing with an individual woman, without seeing the larger picture, in so many different ways.
Aapje58
20d ago
The president declares "No-knock warrants are now classified as potentially lethal force," what changes?
Federal courts have decreed that police violence should be justified by the circumstances, primarily the risk to officers and others, so they would presumably need to be able to argue some proven risk.
Which in this case seems to be absent.
Aapje58
2mo ago
So a conspiracy of 3 people only needs 9 friends and family willing to turn a blind eye to anything suspicious and give the occasional alibi.
This assumes that the people who are part of the conspiracy tell their friends and family, but there are many possible reasons why they would not. For example, some organizations that deal a lot with secret things have a shared culture of not telling even their life partners about it. Another example is that the conspiracy can be very damning to the people involved, so they have a strong incentive to hush it up to everyone. Like a conspiracy that involves 'disappearing' a dead body or one where well-meaning researchers caused immense suffering and damage.
Aapje58
2mo ago
I don't agree with that. The goal of becoming an adult is to fulfill your potential, which can be more, equal or less than that of your father.
In the relationship with God, one can never equal or better, but the crucial part is fulfilling your potential, which is possible.
Aapje58
2mo ago
The point of the ad is not "you should do this". The point of the ad is "this is who we are."
So:
- We are people who cannot translate archaic examples to match the modern world
- We don't understand the bible
- We are no different from leftists, except for being a bit weirder
Because it seems to me that those are the messages being sent.
The point seems to be to peel back some of the enculturated dismissal of Christians as hateful bigots that the world
Is submitting really sending that message, or would it have made more sense to show Christians doing good works. Because in the modern context, washing people's feet are not good works, but seem more like either weird virtue-signalling or a foot-fetish.
Aapje58
3mo ago
But I don't care about abolishing pain. Pain is part of the normal range of feelings that animals, including humans, all experience. It is often necessary and arguably, a full life lived, includes pain.
Feeling pain does not equal suffering, which is something that you seem to be unable to understand. Plenty of pain doesn't rank as suffering in my book, and suffering can exist without physical pain.
Aapje58
4mo ago
In modern times we still see that prostitutes tend to concentrate in cities and that rural men will travel to cities to use their services. So the percentage of prostitutes among the rural populace was likely far lower than in the city.
Everyone in this discussion seems to ignore the social issues with prostitutes in small communities, where people are much more aware of the behavior of people in the community than in the city.
Aapje58
4mo ago
But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!
It just shows that rich men were concentrated in cities, and their extra wealth was greater than the higher cost of living of the city.
What do you find revealing about this? Is the idea that there were huge wealth disparities in the past a revelation to you?
Aapje58
4mo ago
The revealed behavior by women seems to show that they prefer single motherhood over marrying below their station of at least, the station they believe they have.
Aapje58
4mo ago
That may be tolerable for someone who wasn't Netanyahu. Netanyahu built his image on being the Great Defender
If he actually was a great leader, he first of all wouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place, but he would have sacrificed his reputation and his political career for the benefit of Israel once he did end up in this situation.
Aapje58
4mo ago
The default conclusion of this conflict has always been that the Arabs eventually win.
This is exactly why I consider Israel's continuous move towards an ever Greater Israel to be very short sighted. It may strengthen them in the short term by getting them a bit more land and resources, but they have been squandering the chance to create acceptance for Israel from the Arab civilians around them from a position of strength.
If a large number of those Arab civilians come to believe that it's fine or even beneficial to them for Israel to exist, then even if Israel loses its immense position of power (in large part due to having the US back them), they will still be safe, like France is safe from Germany now.
Aapje58
4mo ago
"Punching Richard Spencer will only create a thousand Richard Spencers ready to rise up behind him" is never advanced by leftists as a reason not to punch Richard Spencer.
Of course not, because they have the delusion that their own side is near perfect and won't cause a ton of collateral damage. For example, by having extremists going around punching everyone to the left of Stalin, for being a fascist.
On the right you have people with the same delusions, who think that Israel is surgically hitting Hamas, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Aapje58
4mo ago
bombing Nazi Germany didn't make it stronger,
This statement completely ignores the actual debate at the time, which was the choice between bombing military targets or attacking civilians. Both types of bombings happened during WW II. The available evidence does strongly suggest that attacking civilians creates desires of revenge and thus support for politicians who advocate for the war, rather than making people surrender.
In actual reality, the civilian population of Germany never forced their government to surrender to make the bombings stop, and neither did the people of England, despite the V1 and V2 attacks. And even the Japanese surrender after the nukes didn't result from a lack of support from the people, but the leaders deciding themselves that dying to a nuke was not a sufficiently heroic death for their populace unlike running into a machine gun fire with a bamboo spear in your hands.
So do you want to argue that Hamas can be persuaded to surrender by bombing civilians? My judgment of their ideology, which is different from that of the WW II Japanese, is that this will not happen.
Note that one famous case where the populace did force an end to the war, which is Russia during WW I, didn't involve attacks of the Russian population.
Now maybe there's some advanced theoretical reason why certain targets get stronger when you smash their shit up, but I don't see this articulated
I do, so I guess that you are just in a bubble where you don't read these things?
if they believe that bombing Hamas will only strengthen them?
Well, if you believe that every bomb is hitting Hamas and no civilians are being killed, then it makes perfect sense that you would disbelieve that the bombings can turn neutral civilians into supporters of Hamas, because they want revenge.
I prefer the facts over falsehood, though.
Aapje58
4mo ago
They have literally never noticed that most of the best sprinters are ethnically African.
They obviously notice. A sprinter like Dafne Schippers got a lot more attention because she won despite being 'different.'
Aapje58
5mo ago
If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'.
I think that the progressive stack is not so much about who wins, but how strong certain arguments are considered to be and in what situations they can be used. For example, a black person can use "I'm being discriminated against" even in some situations where they themselves messed up and are simply held accountable, while a white person who is actually being discriminated against, can't use that same argument unless the discrimination is very extreme indeed.
In social combat between woke people, you can expect them to use arguments that work for their identity in the situation. But that still doesn't mean that a black person can always just defeat a white person in social combat. The former just has more options.
Aapje58
5mo ago
No, they sent out 6,000–8,500 knights and mercenaries to suppress the peasants
Yet check out the comments under the latest army recruitment videos that stopped targeting liberals, but went back to targeting the traditional red regions. Many parents from military families state that don't want their children to join the army anymore.
The current elite is not Prussian. They don't see honor in soldiering and their culture rejects guns and law & order. They can't hire mercenaries anymore like in the olden days. So who is going to suppress the peasants, when police and the soldiers are peasants? Why would be elite be able to count on them when the peasants truly lose faith in the system?
Aapje58
5mo ago
Nonsense, they only started to support Hamas after the deradicalized PLO was unable to offer meaningful improvement to their lives, which was in no small part due to Israel losing even a modest will to find a real solution after the killing of Rabin.
Aapje58
5mo ago
this behavior wouldn’t be as bizarre or noteworthy coming from some Israeli official living in Israel
And that is exactly why this resonates. Here we have a person who ostensibly was responsible for an equitable peace between the Palestinians and Israel, but whose response clearly shows an extreme bias to one nation, more like being a citizen of that one nation.
Aapje58
5mo ago
Pushing a narrative is a problem, but they’re actually supposed to be writing articles along the lines of ‘experts say x about y’- it’s what we pay them to do.
How do they know who is a proper expert and who is a charlatan, without knowledge? They don't, so they take the safe and logical route: the 'experts' are those who follow the narrative.
But the side effect is that technology that reduces the workload of nurses is discouraged, since you run into problems if you spend money on technology, rather than nurses. Thus making the nurse shortage worse.
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