Aapje58
3mo 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
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
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.
Both Intifada's were long after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that happened during the Arab–Israeli Wars. You can't retroactively justify ethnic cleansing by arguing that revolt against that cleansing and the subsequent oppression, justified the ethnic cleansing and oppression.
I've never heard anyone argue that a person who fights back after getting sucker punched, retroactively deserved that sucker punch because they fought back. So I have a hard time believing that your argument reflects a principle you hold in general.
Aapje58
6mo ago
I just found that, compared to more traditionally feminine methods of flirtation, explicitly expressing interest in men is often unsuccessful.
But that is a false dichotomy, because almost all flirtation happens when people are talking already, so that's when the approach has already happened. Of course, it is possible to signal interest (or flirt) from afar, but I believe that only a relatively small majority of approaches by men happen only after the woman has specifically signaled her interest in that man and he actually noticed.
In many cases, the man responds to a more general indication that the woman is open to being approached (like wearing revealing clothing) or simply makes the attempt without indications.
I think that the current situation where men don't have clear rules of what is allowed, don't get taught as much what to do and there is less room for making mistakes, leads to fewer and fewer men approaching women without any indications of her interest and putting less trust in ambiguous signals that do signal interest. So women's flirtation game is also not working as well.
The result is then that women who depend on men approaching them are effectively all fighting over a decreasing percentage of men, which automatically means that women are increasingly going to miss out, because the numbers don't match. But the consequences are actually more complex than just women missing out, because the increased bargaining power of those men means that men who do have the natural and or learned ability to deal with the new reality, or the lack of self-preservation instincts, can now 'pump and dump' women or otherwise treat women in ways that are ultimately bad for women.
So superficially it may seem like your approach is working quite well, because unlike men who complain about them failing, women do typically end up having casual sex and/or end up in a relationship with a guy who never gets serious and whom she leaves after a few years to try again, only to be alone for some years, only to get into a relationship with another non-serious person, until she gets close to infertility and either she never ends up with the family she wants or goes for one of the desperation moves (single motherhood, picking some shitty man who does want children, but is a bad parent and partner, etc).
But are those really successes for most women? And at the same time, we have perfectly fine men who end up alone and men who had potential, but were left to whither on the vine.
I believe that unless you change our culture (for which you supplied no plan at all), women in general and at least a solid subset of women, would be better off in the long term if they would adapt to the current situation and would approach shy men and diamonds in the rough. However, what probably won't work that well, is if you start to approach the subset of men that do well with women in the current culture. It's actually in their interest to discourage you from approaching men, because that would give their shy competitors a chance.
It was not the $20 bill on the ground that the other commenter believed it to be. That's all I was claiming.
You are actually the person who came up with the "$20 bill on the ground," not the other commenter. He said that women who approach men would gain rather than lose. He never said that it was trivially easy for women to do this, which your "$20 bill" comment implies.
You also very single-mindedly interpreted that 'gain' as what makes you more comfortable during the initial dating process, which is certainly not the only way to look at it. By that standard, having children is never a 'gain' over remaining childless, as children cause plenty of discomfort, certainly initially. Yet a large majority of people do believe that the benefits are worth it overall.
You may of course believe that the costs of having to approach men are too great (for you), but I don't think you've been charitable to the opinions of f3zinker or myself, when you apparently refuse to even entertain the idea that the downsides you experienced are perhaps solvable (for most women) or are fairly minor inconveniences that you only get so upset about because you've got a bad mindset; and bring upsides that may be larger than the downsides, especially in the long term (by having a substantially higher chance to end up with a better man).
Aapje58
6mo ago
Europeans and other supporters of protection of origin (like India) like to pretend this isn't true but it is
That's a pretty silly way to put it. People also use product names like 'googling stuff' for other search engines, yet the US still allows Google to trademark their name and then bans other companies from slapping Google on their search engines. That's not some sort of denial about how people use language. Legislators simply don't allow language use to dictate things like trademarks and in the EU, product names.
Aapje58
2d 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
21d ago
Why do you think that the right sort of women would not apply? Would they prefer to be among themselves for that kind of banter?
Aapje58
1mo 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
2mo ago
Instead he found frightening, awe-full power beyond his understanding, which worked to compel his faith despite heroic tragedy.
Yes, Christianity is deeply patriarchal. The children do not understand the wisdom of the father, and they don't want to get their vaccines, because the needle hurts, and they do not comprehend the suffering they are being saved from. So they need to trust in the wisdom of the father, and trust that he loves them, even if they don't understand why he asks the things he asks.
Yet this is a very hard sell in a deeply individualized society that rejects patriarchy.
Aapje58
3mo ago
He’s a young, relatively well-informed recent college grad, which just goes to show how effective the Hamas propaganda machine is.
The chance that he's seen Hamas propaganda seems negligible. There are many far more likely explanations, such that he's ignorant of news in general and is concerned with charming the ladies, or is part of a bubble that doesn't signal boost these things (which doesn't mean that it signal boosts Hamas' propaganda).
I consider it rather extremist and leaning towards false or at least unproven conspiracy beliefs to simply assume that beliefs like this are caused by Hamas' propaganda. It also completely denies people any agency. Using the same logic you can explain all kinds of things as being caused directly by propaganda, like your beliefs about Israel being caused by propaganda from Israel, people who have doubt about the elections because controlled by Putin, conservative Catholics being controlled by the Pope, etc.
Aapje58
4mo ago
Again, I do not want to be right about this, but I have encountered no other plausible explanation why for example posters of kidnapped Israelis has whipped up so many into a frothy rage.
They are utterly dishonest war propaganda, pretending not to be. For instance, in the link you posted, one such campaign is said to have the name 'Let the World Know.' But who doesn't know about the kidnapped people? It is utterly disingenuous to pretend that this is just to inform people. Your link furthermore claims:
"There is no Israeli flag on these posters. There is no mention of politics. They are as anodyne as the missing children that used to appear on the side of American milk cartons."
This is again utterly dishonest. The choice to put these people on posters, rather than the people put in prison without trial by Israel, which to me is kidnapping as well, is a political choice. The choice to not put pictures of killed Palestinian civilians on the posters (as well) is a political choice. The choice to put these posters up in Western nations across the world is a political choice, just like it would be a different political choice to put these posters up in front of the Knesset, or in front of a Hamas building in Qatar.
As another poster said, the milk carton kids are intended to allow people to recognize these kids in the streets or whatever, but there is no plausible way that a person will run into a kidnapped Israeli in SF and will then be able to help them by running to the police.
Unless you are willing to seriously discuss the real goal of these posters, and the dishonesty behind the refusal to openly state those goals, I don't see how you can get to a correct analysis.
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
The US could propose making Palestine a UN protectorate that will gradually democratize (taking many decades), similar to how Palestine was a League of Nations protectorate in the past or how Kosovo was a UN protectorate. Then poor in lots of money, open up the borders to Egypt, give them a sea harbor, etc.
Then the support for Hamas and other radicals should dry up as the Palestinians can then get (real) jobs and are mostly safe from IDF and colonist attacks.
Aapje58
5mo ago
The point is that they are a threat to French-language education while they are there.
Aapje58
5mo ago
The justification being that these students are a threat to the French language and that they leave after graduation (if you see a contradiction there, you're not alone).
I don't see the contradiction. In my country the natives are now forced to study in English, at least in part because the universities want the money from foreign students, resulting in them changing to English for most fields. This is even true for those studying the native language.
As a result, the graduated students have difficulty applying their learnings in the native language.
Aapje58
5mo ago
As intelligent beings capable of reasoning on our own.
There is no reasoning on our own when it comes to the meaning of words, as the meaning is inherently dictated by how people perceive it. If I start using a word differently from how others use it, that creates a problem, because then I'm no longer using the same words as others and thus have my own language. This undermines the value of languages as a tool of communication.
There is absolutely no hypocrisy or bad logic in changing the way you use words, when others use it differently as well.
Aapje58
5mo ago
The scientific method, as commonly understood, should preclude the creation and maintenance of entirely fictitious fields of study.
There is actually no common understanding of the scientific method. What Judith Butler does is not comparable in any meaningful way to the work of Ferenc Krausz (and his team). Yet they both claim to do science, even though the work of one of them is not falsifiable.
Part of the charade that allows these nonsensical fields and subfields to exist is the claim that all the professors who work at universities do proper science, even when they do no such thing.
And the ideal scientific method is just aspirational anyway. In reality we cannot achieve that perfection even for physics. When it comes to fields that do not provide the preconditions that allow us to apply something a bit close to the ideal scientific method, people simply use less rigorous methods. Until you get to Judith Butler where claims just get conjured up with bad logic, misrepresentations of what others actually proved, etc.
And like gattsuru says, there is a disturbing lack of interest by institutions (and voters) in even figuring out how well those who call themselves scientists actually do their jobs. Researchers with good morals who do look into it, invariably find highly disturbing results.
Aapje58
6mo ago
The argument seems to be that you have fundamentalist Muslims and non-Muslims pretending to be Muslims for social acceptance, but not actually showing any sign of actually being religious.
Aapje58
6mo ago
I agree with you that there are women who would have a bad time, just like there are men for whom having to approach women means having a bad time. On the other hand, there is also the outside view, from which you can also judge how much nastiness happens to a person by standards that are independent of personal traits/feelings. For example, I think that it is reasonable to say that a WW I soldier in the trenches has a harder time than someone born into wealth and safety, like Richard Corey. Yet as the poem describes, the person of privilege can nevertheless be extremely unhappy. But that doesn't mean that they had to deal with tough circumstances.
It seems that the extent to which people are content depends heavily on what they expect of life or what people get who they consider to be peers. Yet when those expectations aren't met, it doesn't mean that they are truly hard done by. And the big issue that we are dealing with is that many people nowadays seem to have expectations that are unrealistic (in the sense of what behavior/effort on their part will have what result), with unmet expectations. And especially for women, some expectations get cut off due to age, due to infertility and a greater decline in attractiveness due to aging. And it seems that women often only seem to realize that their approach is bad once they get close to 'the cliff' and it is hard to salvage things this late in the game.
Anyway, I have noticed that women who complain about the result of approaching men pretty much always throw up red flags that suggest to me that they don't recognize that it is far harder to learn how to do this than how to wear makeup or dress up nice; and expect a level of success and a lack of bad experiences that is utterly unrealistic. Your story does indicate that you at least tried multiple times, but it is a red flag that you seem to attribute being "ignored, laughed off, or generally regarded as awkward, pathetic, or desperate" to being a woman who approaches men, rather than a lack of skill (and yes, the cold call is way harder than a warm call, so approaching people is way harder than reacting to an approach). It's another red flag that you even consider it worth mentioning as a bad outcome that one(!) man expected sex right away.
If a man would argue that approaching women doesn't work because he was "ignored, laughed off, or generally regarded as awkward, pathetic, or desperate," or would complain that he can't deal with having a single women get the wrong idea and want his baby right away, he would get raked over coals.
Now, an argument can be made that it's not realistic or fair to expect women to take on this task, for biological or cultural reasons. Perhaps women would even become less attractive to men if we increase their stoicism by the same methods that we use on men, so they can deal with even a fraction of the rejection rate that men commonly experience. It's quite likely that we can't even do that, as people appear to have an inbuilt biological drive to treat male children differently, since we apparently don't need a cultural mechanism for much of it. For example, research shows that parents ignore crying male babies much more, but I can't see a cultural mechanism that teaches parents this.
So perhaps only less liberalism would help, although the incredible stupidity of the people that currently are in a position to steer our culture doesn't exactly make it likely that they'll analyse the problem correctly, let alone come up with a working solution that is spread through the propaganda system.
This is just pure racism. The Palestinians didn't fight those wars, countries like Egypt did.
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