Botond173
7hr ago
It's actually worse than all that.
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. Also, boys who have no sisters and no female cousins will tend to develop dumbass ideas about girls because they don't see how they actually behave normally as humans. It also happens with the sexes reversed, I assume.
Widespread use of social media abetted the decline of nightclubs in general, which the COVID lockdowns also heavily contributed to.
Strict enforcement of the 21-year drinking age means that young people over 21 and those under 21 have basically no access to social venues where they can interact.
Atomized societies normalize heightened social mobility for young singles, which means you'll pretty much lose your entire social circle if you have to move to another town after graduation to get some job.
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.
To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.
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.
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.
Botond173
10hr ago
You're both right. At the end, this is what all this eventually boils down to.
Botond173
10hr ago
I'd argue your father, brothers and uncles are actually supposed to provide you with a safety net if you get into a bad situation with your fiancé/husband by giving him a severe beating.
Botond173
10hr ago
Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.
So I've heard a sort of interesting argument regarding these incentives in general. What they are mostly designed to do anywhere they are enacted is convince couples in stable marriages with one child to have a second one. That's it. It's because it's the one incentive the majority of citizens are still willing to support, because just handing out wads of cash to women for birthing babies isn't politically acceptable anywhere. So of course they won't end up doing much, because the people they're meant to help are not the majority to begin with.
Botond173
10hr ago
I guess in the end it all boils down to the simple advice that "you should have your first child while you're still young". You can imagine how popular that is among women anywhere.
Botond173
10hr ago
You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids.
I imagine there's actually no society anywhere that'd even want to do this. And for good reasons.
Botond173
10hr ago
It wouldn't happen if the guaranteed subsidy to mothers was calculated according to their actual income before conception.
Indeed. You can't have one half of a child. If you have a child, it's at least one. (I'm so smart, right?) It's a relatively small change in the life of the mother only if she has 3 or more children already, assuming there are zero health complications, which is not realistic in many cases sadly.
Botond173
10hr ago
Relative differences in TFR between different social groups matter a lot even in circumstances of demographic implosion. If, say, the Turkish minority in Germany has a TFR of 1.8 while that of legacy Germans (or whatever we call them) is 1.2, then, all else being equal, the number of the former will be decreasing at a pace 33% slower than that of the latter. (I guess I did the math right.) If, however, all else is not equal, which is probably the case indeed, and the Turkish minority is relatively younger on average, with a lower average age at motherhood, the difference may be 50%, 60% or more.
This is why irreversible demographic trends exist in modern Western societies. The bullet has been fired a long time ago and cannot be stopped, it's just that most people haven't realized it yet. (Yeah, I just stole that phrase from another commenter, sorry.)
Botond173
11hr ago
It's like when Greta Thunberg appeared in the media.
A [Quasi-normie leftist activist climate warrior soyboy]: OMG LOOK AT THIS STUNNING AND BRAVE YOUNG LADY! SO FIERCE! SHE'S NOT AFRAID TO STAND IN FRONT OF THE MIC AND MAKE HERSELF HEARD! YOU GO GRRL! STICK IT TO THE SYSTEM!
B [Average normie NPC griller]: "But dude, wait, it says in this article here that some handler wrote the speech for her, it was all pre-planned, rehearsed beforehand..."
A: WELL DUH, DUMBASS! WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?! IT'S COMPLETELY NORMAL FOR A PUBLIC FIGURE TO HAVE HER STAFF PREPARE SPEECHES FOR HER, AND REHEARSE THEM AND CAREFULLY PREPARE FOR THEM! IT'S ALL ABOUT YOUR IMAGE AND MAKING AN IMPRESSION! EVERYBODY DOES IT LIKE THIS! THAT'S HOW IT GOES EVERYWHERE!
Botond173
1d ago
he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power
There is supposedly even video evidence of this, courtesy of a local TV channel. I can't comment on this because I don't speak Slovak.
Botond173
1d ago
I sort of remember when the Berlin incident was discussed here. It seems that it was not going to be culture war fodder at all without the climate protestors added to the mix. I can imagine the local rightist opposition, to the meagre extent it even exists, would have still tried to turn it into a scandal, but which leftist is going to question the victim status of an almost murdered trucker who wanted to assist a female cyclist (so presumably a leftist voter/sympathizer) after accidentally running her over, warm feelings toward both the homeless and refugees notwithstanding?
To the extent that the flames of the culture war were being fanned in this case, I reckon 95% of it was due to the climate protestors doubling down in characteristic fashion, and explaining, with their usual mix of complete cynicism and complete idealism, that of course public protests entail negative consequences stemming from the disruption of traffic, dumbass!
Botond173
1d ago
Let's not get carried away.
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It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia. I can very much assure you, for example, that there is no, and has never at any point been, consensus on this supposed extraordinary increase in Hungary.
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To the extent that there was tangible increase in prosperity in Poland, most of it is obviously explained by the severity of austerity measures introduced in the final years of socialism. It's a matter of relative difference, and people's emotional revulsion at a regime which permitted the evil Russkies to station their orcs on sacred Polish soil and whatnot.
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I find it somewhat odd that you added Belarus to this list. As far as I know, it was, in fact, the one post-Soviet country that largely survived the '90s without economic collapse, social disintegration and widespread anomie, at least compared to the other unfortunate post-USSR republics.
But anyway, let's not pretend that this is not even surprising. Slovakia has been an independent polity for a combined period of roughly 35 years (1939-45, 1993-). Was there even one political assassination such as the current one during those years? As far as I can tell, no.
Botond173
2d ago
At this point, what would it even need to be contained from? It seems to me that the entire rationalist / new atheist sphere is moribund.
Botond173
2d ago
I, for one, would love to hear from Atlanticists and Putinists as well what they think the endgame is here. No, really. Like, what?
Botond173
2d ago
So a bit of a time ago there was a discussion here about the gender war, demographic implosion and political male-female divide in South Korea. @rokmonster stated that "Seoul is the only city worth living in [there]" as self-evident fact, apparently.
As someone who knows little about Korea, I find this puzzling. Aren't there other large cities there? I'm sure there are. Are they really that bad? And if yes, what is "that"?
Botond173
2d ago
Yes, it was fine. And it's not like the current social regime is not as unjust in other aspects, so it doesn't matter.
Anyway, why are you also bringing up inequality? This entire subject has nothing to do with inequality.
Botond173
2d ago
Well, yes, this is a classic misunderstanding. Cads aren't johns per definition, they're men who prioritise casual sex and other forms of hedonism and avoid the social role of the father, the husband, the provider and worker. It's not a matter of visiting brothels or not.
Botond173
2d ago
Very obviously the bear vs man meme is about the threat of rape, torture and murder, not about weirdness being icky. The main characteristic of a bear isn't that it's weird, it's that it's a mortal threat. Let's not fool ourselves. The reason the feminist commenter above brought up "weirdness" instead of "attempted rape/murder" is due to his intent of portraying the average woman as living in constant fear of something mundane and widespread and yet horrific (supposedly).
Botond173
2d ago
It would though. Not because of the state of war, but because all people of Japanese ancestry under US government, with or without US citizenship, were interned. In contrast, the ethnic operations of the NKVD during the Great Purge did not target nationalities as a whole, with the exception of Koreans. The Soviet forced resettlement of 'traitor' minorities in wartime, however, did.
Botond173
2d ago
- How is prostitution being normalized evidence of inequality? Do you see it as proof that womankind's lot is uniquely bad?
- What does this issue have to do with equality in the first place exactly?
Botond173
2d ago
With regard to the so-called ethnic campaigns I think it's necessary to point out that the ethnic minorities who were targeted (in a loose sense) in the purges all had ethnic homelands of their own which bordered the USSR and were either hostile states, former wartime adversaries like Poland or Finland, or colonized by a hostile state, such as Korea under Japanese rule. While this was never expressed officially, the purges and terror waves targeted individuals with any ties abroad, no matter how insignificant, because the regime accused foreign governments of secretly plotting to overthrow the Soviet system with the assistance of recruited internal wreckers, spies, traitors, terrorists etc. It is for this reason that Korean, Latvian, Polish etc. minorities were hugely overrepresented among the victims of state terror, not because the regime wanted to stick it to non-Russians as such.
The normal sedan can accommodate two car seats at the back, but not three (I remember reading a surprisingly informative post about this whole issue on the old subreddit). Also, two double-bed rooms are no longer sufficient during a family vacation with three children instead of two. So I'd argue the big change is from two to three in terms of effect on the whole family.
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