Botond173
11d ago
I don't know why the observation that there are more camel toes in a modern gym than in a zoo struck a nerve.
I believe the only women who can wear tight-fitting pants and yet not expose their camel toes are the pretty and slender ones – it’s just how female anatomy is – and women who aren’t like this don’t want to be reminded of it. The bygone patriarchy enforced the norm of female modesty which acted as a sort of non-aggression pact among women and took the ‘unfair’ advantage of hot women away. Feminists have demolished this without thinking twice and now their daughters and granddaughters are rightfully mad. Ideas have consequences.
Botond173
11d ago
I’m aware that the political strategy of the firewall / sanitary cordon has worked so far. My argument is that the success of this has not merely depended on deterrence, cancel culture and psychological duress but also the ability of the mainstream parties to plausibly sell a positive vision of the future. It’s this ability that has now slipped away, and only punitive methods remain to keep the masses in line. I don’t see how they can keep having electoral victories like this.
Botond173
11d ago
I know what you're going to say – sure, straight men have ulterior motives for laughing at a hot woman's unfunny jokes, but straight women don't, so hot women must still be receiving some accurate feedback on which material works and which doesn't.
I wasn't going to say that actually because the notion that hot women would ever feel compelled to tell jokes to or have banter with either other hot women or plain women never occurred to me.
But even if an attractive woman could somehow make herself funny, that in itself wouldn't make herself more desirable to the opposite sex.
Indeed.
It follows that the only women who'll join rock bands are either a) women who simply cannot resist following their artistic muses, or b) physically unattractive women desperate for something to make them seem more attractive or higher in status than they otherwise would be: no man really wants to date a girl who's a 4, but if you had to date a 4, a 4 who plays in a band might seem that bit cooler than a 4 who doesn't.
I'd also argue they are in many such cases willfully entering a predominantly male subculture in order to increase their mating chances due to themselves not being able to find eligible mates the conventional way for whatever reason.
Botond173
11d ago
I think women are generally not expected to impress men with sophisticated social skills.
Botond173
11d ago
Has anyone involved in this scandal in any capacity had the temerity to state the obvious - that women are generally not funny because nobody expects them to be so?
Botond173
11d ago
There’s another aspect to this. Dissident rightists and conservatives in general already have had an image as pessimist doomsayers and alarmists; that’s hardly anything new. It all plays into them generally losing elections. But in the case of mainstream liberals the attitude that is essentially the same or at least rather similar to this is relatively new and contradicts their usual image.
Botond173
11d ago
Not only are the stories told from the perspective of male characters, but those characters are completely unattractive to women. Tadano is a soft, unthreatening nice guy whose special ability is reading the room. Gojo is a fucking autist with zero sex drive who enjoys making dresses for dolls; if he was living in a less repressed society, he would be sucking cock in a gay bar, and he would be happy, instead of forcing himself to get hard enough to bang the retarded gyaru.
Well, I've not read the manga but I've seen the series and the bolded parts are plainly false. Either way, it all struck me as being targeted at female cosplayers and would-be cosplayers.
Botond173
11d ago
That’s just one aspect of it. Another is that the expansion process entails the provision of an US security guarantee to the Baltic nations, which are usually considered to be unable to defend themselves from a Russian invasion for more than 3-4 days or so, and the idea that the US would actually adhere to this guarantee is questionable. Before the expansion of NATO this was not much of an issue because a potential Soviet invasion and nuclear strike would’ve predominantly targeted West Germany and would have inevitably also targeted US military units stationed there, which is a clear act of war.
Another aspect of this whole process is that it clearly created some sort of illusion among Ukrainian nationalists that the Russian leadership will one day basically capitulate to them by doing nothing while Ukraine joins NATO and retains sovereignty over the Crimea and presumably expelling the Russian fleet from the naval base of Sevastopol.
Botond173
12d ago
I do. I suggest you and @Shrike can have a conversation about this.
Botond173
12d ago
The Finns sued for peace two times between 1940 and 1944 in their conflict with the USSR. Did they make the wrong choice then?
Botond173
12d ago
Trump has been very vocal about how Zelensky needs to stop using the targeting data that the US supplies them.
I'm guessing there is an evident question to be asked here.
Botond173
12d ago
Liberals don't advocate for de-jure open borders. But they believe that everyone who just walks up to the border should be able to make an asylum claim. And what do you know, liberals also believe that they should all be allowed to live and work while waiting for their claim to be processed, and of course they also believe that only an evil nazi racist would deny their totally valid claims.
Don't we have recent lived experience of this not actually being applicable when the refugees happen to be Boers?
Botond173
12d ago
Because they view the Ukraine war as an existential threat to the end of history and they liberal world order.
It rather seems that they did away with the ‘End of History’ thesis already and no longer believe that the process of globalization can continue in they way they generally imagined (well, fantasized) that it would. I think this should, in turn, reinforce the perception that they have recently (around 2014 or so) adopted a rather pessimist worldview. They are now treating Russia, China, North Korea, India and their ‘puppets’ as an enemy bloc that is to be sanctioned and cordoned off from the rest of the world that has inexorably and thankfully transitioned to liberal globalism.
And they aren't saying they should fight a war just they they should arm themselves to protect themselves and their families as Russia has shown itself to be a threat. A very conservative message if you think about it
I argue there are aspects to Western foreign policy regarding Ukraine that should at least make it rather questionable to conservatives. The most obvious one is that it’s happening in the context of a long-term policy of eastward NATO expansion (with a bunch of consequences of its own) which I think US conservatives should at least be skeptical about. The second is that whenever liberals emphasize the supposedly huge cultural differences between Ukraine and Russia the always focus on the wonderful globohomo-ness of the former; this should at least make conservatives think twice about the whole affair. The third I can think of is that the more cynical liberal-adjacent talking heads seem willing to admit that it’s not for the prosperity and well-being of the Ukrainian people that the war should be escalated but to weaken Russia which in turn is supposed to have fantastic benefits in the future or something. Again, obvious grounds for skepticism, I think. Four: conservatives should ponder what exactly the long-term goal of Atlanticist policy regarding Ukraine in particular was after 2004 or so and especially after 2014.
Now some might rightly point out that these are foundations of sand and I agree the democratic establishment is on borrowed time and I agree but it is still a massive juggernaut and I'm not confident it will be overturned in the next presidential politics.
I’m guessing you’re referring to the gerontocratic nature of the Dem leadership?
Botond173
13d ago
of all the people that are actively living and dying in misery at our hands
I'm assuming this is meant to refer to victims of global warming and colonialism?
Botond173
13d ago
I'd like to contrast two opinions that were posted here a while back to hopefully make a larger point.
Below there are arguments from @Southkraut posted in this chain of discussion:
By the right wing in a political spectrum that has shifted so far left that even the most tepid immigration control measures are considered the extreme of permissible politics. I'm sorry, but no, this movement to the right in no way proves that the left is not in firm control. Their electoral setbacks are, in the greater scheme of things, temporary and minor, while their social and demographic victories are permanent and far-reaching. Yes they overreached, did too much too quickly and alienated voters that way, but the left needing to spend some time without control of this or that executive or legislative and seeing a small fraction of their accomplishments rolled back is not proof of the lasting ascendancy of the right.
Even if this should be the full awakening of the natives to their intentional replacement and the imminent grab for power of the right over all the governments of Europe and even the end of all immigration, the demographic damage is done. The left can afford to let go of the reins of states for a while, or maybe even altogether. It won't change the fate of the continent at this point.
Yes we currently have an upswing of right-wing sentiment as the leftist strangelhold on public discourse slackens, but that's because the leftists, in their time of triumph, overreached somewhat while already on the finishing line. But it's only a stumble; they can and most likely will recover, and if the footrace metaphor holds, then this stumble makes no difference because the right is crawling along far behind with its legs hacked off and bleeding out.
The left has already won. The takeover happened, and it held, and still holds. All public institutions all over Europe are firmly in the hands of leftist partisans. All the predominant narratives that public discourse rests on are shaped by leftist framing. And above all, greatest accomplishment and final victory of the left, demographics are a done deal. The natives are on an inescapable track towards becoming minorities in their own countries, and foreigners will become the majority in Europe within this century. There is no fixing this, and there is no suriviving it for the right.
And below is a comment by @MaiqTheTrue:
My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.
White Guilt, and present militarism
In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.
Environment
Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.
Capitalism
The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.
Trump
You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.
All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.
As far as I'm concerned one can also add "Sexism" and "Social media" to that list. (We can certainly say, for example, that the Blue Tribe mainly blames supposedly harmful social media trends - basically the fatal lack of external censorship and repression - for Trump's election victories in 2016 and 2024 and for Brexit as well.) And as far as the anti-anti-Zionist liberals are concerned, their attitude towards anti-Semitism is the same. Either way, this summary does strike me as spot on. Whenever I encounter members of the Blue Tribe online or even offline it's undoubtedly this pessimistic, doomerist, resentful, even elegiac vibe I'm getting most of the time, especially from single women. And this seems to have been a cultural trend since Gamergate. In contrast, I think the victories of modern liberalism have mainly stemmed from its image of representing not an ideology but the consensus among cool and smart people promoting the vision of a better tomorrow, basically someone like your cool and cheerful wine-drinking, pot-smoking aunt/uncle. It was this vibe that helped them gain electoral victories as well and now this vibe is completely dead. Now we're at a point where the political parties in the EU representing Blue Tribe normies are basically campaigning with the message to having to fight yet another great Eastern European war in the very near future which is supposedly necessary to avert some even bigger disaster or something.
I'd argue that it's actually the profound pessimism of Blue Tribe messaging and its political consequences that Southkraut's pessimism is not taking into account.
Botond173
13d ago
I reckon she was also recorded coughing up some sort of suspicious green phlegm.
Botond173
13d ago
My Dress-Up Darling and Komi Can't Communicate did come across to me as more female-oriented than not.
Botond173
14d ago
I disagree and think 2rafa is on point here. It's generally not effectiveness that elicits rage in the cultural war but the utilization of symbolism i.e. attacking symbols one way or another. This particular decision about making the execution public acts as ragebait without providing one ounce of political utility to Trump. It's not that one should abandon effectiveness out of courtesy but that political measures are to be effective whether they induce rage or not.
Botond173
15d ago
I am specially fond of Nagatoro; my heart melted when I read chapter 114. I was so proud of Senpai for finally having the courage to ask Nagatoro to pose nude for him; it's a very beautiful scene that is the culmination of six years of character and relationship development.
According to the same subreddit his evolution progressed even further since then.
On a different note I'm not that sure all of the series you mentioned are aimed at (young) men.
Botond173
16d ago
Granted that you're right, it seems one of two phenomena is at work here, or a mixture of both: the attitudes of the female cosplayer subculture are themselves changing, or there is a process of E-thot entryism taking place there.
Valid points, I have to admit. I'd bring up the memory hole phenomenon here. Based on my rather cursory knowledge of these matters, the social scare about a new ice age was a rather short-lived phenomenon based on faulty scientific interpretations of dust and air pollution levels and caused by an unusually cold winter. This happened during the Carter Presidency when the concepts of green energy and environmental protection first got official sanction. And since Carter is generally remembered as a one-term disappointment and a well-meaning idealist loser who sadly paved the way for Reaganism unintentionally, down the memory hole this whole affair went among liberals.
The same applies to the whole overpopulation scare. As it pretty much stemmed from racism and classism, at least from a current left-wing perspective (i.e. the perception that brown and poor people are gross, and anything that's gross is always seen as proliferating), liberals generally disowned that as well afterwards. In fact, today they see overt concerns about overpopulation as Nazi-coded. The origin story of Planned Parenthood was also thrown down the memory hole for the same reason.
The campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament / so-called nuclear freeze? Basically the same story. Such people today would get imprisoned as Russian agents and traitors. To the extent that liberals today are even against nuclear weapons (that is: pretty much none at all) it seems it's mostly just sadness and resentment that Russia has them as well because otherwise it'd be feasible to defeat and dismember (i.e. 'decolonize') the country.
So to sum it up: I think your argument is correct and liberals who adopted such beliefs in the past were probably more mainstream than not on balance. But it makes for important context that their tribe changed their views afterwards and disowned the old ones. Their current view which also shapes the mainstream is that such pessimism and doomerism was never their thing.
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