Botond173
3mo ago
Since the complaints about Trump are growing ever more shrill in Western Europe as well and there’s an increasing level of liberal doomposting about him online, I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events. I guess most of them agree that Hillary should’ve won in 2016 but was undermined by manufactured scandals and whatnot, but I’d put forth the argument that the US culture war was already getting so heated by that point that liberals weren’t going to secure long-term political gains through such a victory. After all, Congress was still going to be majority(?) Republican, and it was always going to be possible for Trump to win the candidacy in 2020.
If we observe what dissident right-wingers describe as the Gramscian long march through the institutions, it’s fair to conclude that the way for liberalism to win is through incremental but irreversible gains, completed while real and potential enemies remain complacent and clueless, distracted all the time by issues that are ultimately irrelevant. Thus the interest of liberals normally isn’t to escalate the culture war, no matter how good it makes them feel about themselves, but to deescalate it, and win small victories without generating too much public hostility and alienation. There’s a time for humiliating your enemies if that’s what you want, but only when they’re fatally weakened and on the ground.
Concluding from this I’d argue that the time to avert the current mess which horrifies the average liberal was in 2012, either through a) not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney, which I guess would have entirely been possible had Obama’s reelection chances not seemed slim, and which wouldn’t have ended up paving the way for someone like Trump b) Romney or someone similar winning the election through not actually being a timid cuck but not being as polarizing as Trump, and ending up governing for one term.
What do you think?
Botond173
1yr ago
Indeed, it's a humiliation ritual. Again, I cannot even name one statue of Stalin or Lenin that suffered the same fate.
Botond173
2yr ago
All the above said, “where did the Jews go” is the most persuasive anti-revisionist argument. Revisionist explanations, which involve a balanced measure of “to Russia”, “to the West”, “they died but not deliberately”, “they stayed in place but secularized and assimilated unbelievably quickly under communism” and “they never existed in the first place” are deeply unpersuasive.
I don't think this entire debate is about the numbers though. It's misdirection to say that it is. It's about a) the methods used b) the political and cultural legacy of it all.
Botond173
2yr ago
"Of course Trump was going to win, the writing was on the wall."
Who even claimed that?
Botond173
10mo ago
It’s easy to forget that when the large majority of men suck, the large majority of women are unhappy. If you think it’s tough being a shitty loser man in a low-sex marriage, imagine being his wife and having to fuck him every month. Having to muster up the willpower to, essentially, let a man that you don’t want to fuck – that every fiber in your body is screaming at you to run away from – rape you, because you don’t want to break apart your family or lose your stability.
Many wives and girlfriends, simply put, do not want to fuck their loser men. But the alternative is worse. Breaking families apart, losing financial stability and all of the labor their men provide, turning their lives upside down – these women essentially feel like their lives are being held at gunpoint. They don’t want to have sex, but the men in their lives have power over them, and because these men have power over them, they allow these men to rape them. They don’t love their men – at least not in a sexual way – and are simply allowing themselves to be used for sexual release by someone who has power over them.
Women who are married to or involved with loser men feel like handmaids, from the TV show. No respect, no love, just monthly rapes because the alternative is worse. And this is why The Handmaids Tale speaks to so many women.
Like most fictional novels, The Handmaid’s Tale caters to its audience. Not too long into the book, the evil oppressor man who owns the female protagonist starts to become interested in her for more than just her handmaid duties. And, of course, there’s another man that she eagerly wants to fuck in between forced fuckings, who loves her back because, as we all know from Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and other such books, men always fall left and right an average woman for absolutely no reason whatsoever simply because there’s something so darn indescribably special about her. The book quickly turns from its dystopian commentary about America’s dark future into a tale of this woman’s hopes, dreams, and attempts to escape to a better life with a better man – directly speaking to its target audience of unhappy wives.
Remember, the majority of men are losers. Well, not really. They’re average guys. But in the eyes of women, that makes them losers. Most women are not happy with most men. They’re just whoring themselves out for money, labor, and stability. Meanwhile, they dream of an escape to a better life with a better man. And over time, these feelings take a toll. The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to modern women because modern women literally feel oppressed by their men. On some level, deep down inside, they feel powerless, used, and raped by the men who love them.
Botond173
1yr ago
And General Lee was never charged with, nor found guilty of, "treason", so that doesn't count either.
Botond173
1yr ago
When the Manosphere discussed the phenomenon of ‘divorce rape’, they didn’t just mean the issue of alimony payments, they also meant the ways child support payments are calculated, the way those are enforced, and the way child visitation rights are decided. Yes, I speak of that sphere in the past tense because I think it’s warranted, and yes, I’m aware that all of that can affect unmarried men as well, but I think it’s fair to say they mostly affect divorced men.
Botond173
1yr ago
Excuse me but somehow I don’t feel compelled by an argument based on a grand jury indictment that is described as “forgotten legal and moral case” that “went missing for 72 years” (Huh? What even?). Considering a case where a general of a defeated army isn’t found guilty by any court on the victorious side of treason, or anything of the same magnitude for that matter, I’m prone to accept their judgment, or rather lack thereof, instead of that of modern-day Red Guards 150 years later who’re obviously all cocksure in their own ability to always know better.
But anyway, I get your point, or at least I think I do, but keeping in mind that accusing someone, even in his grave, of treason is serious business, especially if he was held in high regard by Churchill, Eisenhower, Wilson and so on (see the link above) so I think we ought to word such accusations accurately. What exactly did Lee betray? A constitution that is explicitly anti-racist and forbids slavery? Clearly not. A federal system that clearly forbids the secession of federal states in all cases? As far as I know, that’s not the case either – again, I understand that that Confederate states technically didn’t secede in a legal manner. A president who wanted to abolish slavery? No.
At the end of the day, what he did betray in full is a political code which holds that a military officer, when appointed and ordered, is to march his men into his own homeland and wreak destruction on it as if it was enemy territory.
Botond173
7mo ago
I vaguely remember some right-wingers (at least Walt Bismarck for sure) making the argument a couple of months ago that it’s a dumb mistake on the part of some(?) Republicans to agitate against Taylor Swift due to her activism. Their reasoning was that it doesn’t make political sense to alienate the swifties, as most of them are just average women who don’t necessarily reject traditional gender norms and aren’t hardliner wokes. In light of recent election results, what can we make of this argument in retrospect?
Botond173
1yr 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
1yr ago
if Zelensky had been more pusillanimous / conciliatory to the Russians
Do you mean before or after the war broke out?
Botond173
6mo ago
Why don’t we just let Russia have the territory of former Novorossiya? The same arguments apply as here.
Botond173
1yr ago
In last week’s thread, @greyenlightenment made the following observation regarding the evergreen subject of the sex recession:
It's interesting how some on the right has shifted from decrying how there is too much promiscuity (pre-2021 or so), to now from a trad-perspective decrying how young people are not having enough sex and lowered fertility rates.
As far as I can tell, this almost counts as a recurring theme among online leftists (not that I consider @greyenlightenment to be one in particular), one that serves as an ideological cudgel and also as a short cautionary tale with a “careful what you wish for” message. But I certainly don’t think it’s baseless, which is the other reason I think it merits more discussion here.
I happen to have vague memories of various conservative arguments I encountered after discovering Townhall and other similar right-wing sites in the early 2000s, and one thing they definitely liked to address regarding sexual mores was the embarrassingly high teenage pregnancy rate in the US. Well, I’m no sociologist but I suspect this statistical anomaly was and is(?) largely explained by the presence of large African-American and Latino ethnic minorities, plus the presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control, but of course mainstream conservatives were not going to point that out, opting instead to use this as a lame argument against encroaching sexual licentiousness or something.
Other than this, I’d not say it was too much promiscuity as such that conservatives decried, to the extent they even bothered, but the apparent push to normalize and sanitize female promiscuity in pop culture. I specifically remember the 2004 romantic comedy The Girl Next Door, for example, because multiple conservative commentators pointed out that its depiction of a supposedly average porn actress living the dream without suffering any social or psychological consequences of her career choice is misleading at best. There was also Sex in the City as well, obviously.
Anyway, this was all a long time ago, and I only brought up these two off the top of my head to encourage others here to bring up similar memories of their own.
On a different note, I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest. After all, yes, surely they are happy to see teenage pregnancy rates and STD rates falling, for example, but they also surely never wanted any of this to happen as a consequence of social atomization and the overall atrophy of socializing itself, which is something that clearly contradicts conservative ideals.
Also, let’s not forget that teenage delinquency in general was generally seen as a big problem back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and not just by conservatives. Back then it was obviously very difficult to foresee a future where average parents actually wished that their teenage children went outside and hanged out at the park, the mall or the arcade.
Botond173
1yr ago
They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean.
Just how deep does that lack of understanding run? Do these women actually still not realize that trying to outdo one another in pandering to the short-term sexual proclivities of the top 5% of men will never get them the one thing they really crave, which is the attention and devotion of a worthy man?
Botond173
1yr ago
Among average liberal suburban normies in the US, one generally accepted narrative regarding political history is that Republican administrations between 1968-92 have committed a horrific, unspeakable, terribly evil etc. crime against BIPOC by enacting a policy of mass incarceration of African-American (and, to a much lesser extent, Latino) young men in the name of the 'war on drugs' and 'law and order' in order to pander to the racist sentiments of hwhite garbage humans. (As far as I know, nothing of this sort has ever happened in Sweden.) Therefore there's no chance at all of any politician making the kamikaze decision of trying to drum up support for law and order.
Botond173
10mo ago
The USSR would probably still exist without Gorbachev's efforts to reform it.
Botond173
8mo ago
The so-called sex recession has been discussed both here and on the two old subreddits extensively, and a consensus seems to have formed for a good reason (I think) that it's not actually a sex recession per se but instead a socialization/community recession, a recession of social interaction. That is, it's not only sexual activity that is declining but also every form of socializing and all traditional social circles (churches, clubs, associations etc.), and the sex recession is just one consequence of that.
There are three related phenomena that I remember being occasionally addressed on the subreddits, namely:
- The decline of shopping malls.
- The decline of arcades.
(These two started to take place largely around the turn of the millennium and were exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis, and can be explained by a combination of social and technological trends but that's not the point here.)
-
The long-term effects of the federal enforcement of 21 as the drinking age, as a phenomenon peculiar to the USA. This meant that people over 21 and under 21 have no venues or social circles left where they can interact, and teenagers who graduate from high school and subsequently lose that place as a venue for socializing basically find no replacement for that, because every conceivable venue that could fill that role caters to people over 21.
-
The proportion of 18-year-olds with driver's licenses has apparently also declined massively, which appears to be a phenomenon tied to the ones above; anyway, I don't remember it ever being discussed here in detail.
All in all, the obvious combined effect of all of this is the massive loss of what sociologists call third places for teenagers in particular. And all this happened before the proliferation and normalization of smartphone/tablet use, which had its own great consequences, of course.
So, to get to my question: have there been studies about this particular phenomenon and its effect on the sex recession or the social lives of teenagers / 20-somethings? Because there must have been one. Was it ever even discussed in mainstream media?
Botond173
10mo ago
But none of this means that the USSR couldn't still exist.
Regarding the part on independence, let's be more precise. Out of all SSRs, it was the three small Baltic ones which had significant independence movements, and this happened years after Gorbachev created an atmosphere where political dissent was normalized. He wasn't willing to do any bloodshed to keep the USSR together indeed, at least not to an impactful degree, precisely because his entire political line hinged on the assumption that he needed to capture the West's goodwill in order to have his reforms implemented and secure foreign loans, and he believed this all could only work without bloodshed. Outside the Baltics, the fact was that independence movements were rather weak or nonexistent, even in Ukraine, for that matter.
the more moderate activists got on with their normal lives, leaving only the most radical remaining, who in turn radicalised eachother.
That probably also explains much of the political unrest that took place in the young Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1923 or so.
Now that the Great Awokening is in decline, the normies are quietly removing the pronouns from their email signatures and taking down their Pride flags
It's probably more accurate to say that it was successfully completed. The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point. Those who stopped virtue-signalling are the older ones who haven't received such indoctrination.
Botond173
1mo ago
I guess it’s just a simple case of scarcity. Women tend to either have well-shaped tits that are small, or big tits that are often misshapen and saggy, and of course get increasingly saggy with aging, which most women are terrified of already. Only a small minority of women have the sort of ideal breasts that earn you a Playboy photoshoot, so small that it’s impossible to fill all titty mags only with pictures of them. Hence the sad and pathetic proliferation of bolt-on tits.
Botond173
5mo ago
Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient.
The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.
To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier
(emphasis mine)
Botond173
1yr ago
The simple truth is that nobody, either man or woman, should ever go hiking in the woods alone, with or without bears inhabiting those woods, period.
Botond173
2yr ago
The people of Odessa seem to hate Russian imperialism more than they are grateful for the one time she demanded a city be built on their soil.
So I reckon they'd prefer to live in village shacks as barbarians (also in the original sense of the word) - i.e. not in a city - than to suffer that statue to stand?
I wonder if there is anything particular and common in the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes that made them such an easy prey of the woke vanguard. It's sort of fascinating in a bizarre way how easily both were captured.
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