Botond173
5d ago
So now Reuters is stating that Russia is a "larger, better-equipped enemy"? Really? This is where we're at, after more than 2 years? They actually have the cheek to say this? Every single liberal leftist normie-oriented talking head I ever encountered kept repeating for months that the orc invasion force is completely undersized for the task, their rapist orc cannon fodder is deserting en masse and running from their positions like rabbits, they ran out of artillery shells and missiles, have no food, no gear, no body armor, no tanks, what equipment they have is all a piece of crap etc.
Botond173
17hr ago
Russia is actively taking refugees from the middle east and elsewhere and shipping them to the Finnish border where they are provided with bicycles and told to cross.
How is that, in effect, different from what Serbian, Macedonian and Turkish authorities were doing in 2015?
Botond173
5d ago
except his wife and daughters
Well, yes. That's the point. "Men had authority over women in return, similar to how parents protect their children but expect their children to obey them."
Botond173
5d ago
Ukraine should institute an immediate draft where women who are not pregnant or rearing children are drafted into the frontlines
Or, if not to the frontlines, at least to auxiliary service or work in the defense industry. (Which is basically how single, childless British women were drafted during WW2.)
Botond173
5d ago
I know what I've seen and heard. They claimed with absolute certainty that Ukraine will win decisively in a relatively short time.
Botond173
5d ago
I remember the time when Finnish (or Estonian or Latvian...I can't remember) authorities specifically stated at the time of the Russian partial mobilization that they will not give Russian refugee men asylum. Their foreign minister (as far as I can remember) declared that "coming to Europe is a privilege, not a right". Of course, being relatively old, I remembered the rhetoric of this exact same cabal at the time of the 2015 refugee crisis. I understood that only a pathologically evil cabal can be this shameless and brazen. It's mind-boggling, really.
Botond173
5d ago
Housing prices doubled in a year.
That had to result in immense social tension. Can you comment on this?
Botond173
5d ago
The common narrative on all NAFO-adjacent and NAFO-sympathizing mainstream news outlets was that the Russians will not be able to replace their losses in armor, will run out of cruise missiles, their fortified positions will be pounded into dust because they're a paper bear, they're so dumb that they thought they can overrun Ukraine in 3 days with fewer than 200 thousand soldiers etc.
Botond173
6d ago
a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts)
This is not the first time I got the impression that the Chinese Communists have had great success even in the West in greatly exaggerating the long-term consequences of the Opium Wars waged by Western imperialist devils. It makes sense on their part, as it's an integral part of their narrative on the so-called "century of humiliation". As far as I know, though, opium addiction was never anywhere near as widespread in China as the Communists later claimed. Opium dens obviously existed in urban areas, but the great majority of guests weren't addicts; in fact, addicts weren't tolerated there, as nobody was permitted to occupy tables for long. It's true that lots of peasants consumed opium as a painkiller, but considering their usual workload, this wasn't surprising. The claim that as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts is, to me, highly suspect.
Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it.
It's worth adding that, I guess, living in place that is basically a fortress surrounded by barbed wire, in a state of constant vigilance and paranoia, might seem entirely tolerable to some aging Boomer who's living in fear and thinking only in terms of security and certainty anyway, as long as the standard of living is sort of good, but for their children it's a vastly different story, especially if they're educated. Which is what you alluded to in an earlier comment of yours earlier in the thread indeed.
Botond173
5d ago
Their armed forces in their entirety are bigger. The forces they can realistically deploy in the Ukraine aren't.
Botond173
5d ago
Agreed. Times have changed. I suppose there was an era when porn was largely seen as a mostly harmless pastime of adolescent boys, who were assumed to consume it only in moderation, partly because it was relatively complicated to obtain as compared to now. Not anymore.
Botond173
11d ago
I decided to share my theory (if we can call it that) about the origin of the ‘incel’ slur. I’m not claiming it’s terribly original or anything but I welcome your feedback about it because it’s a pure culture war phenomenon in my view and I wonder if my theory is sound.
To start with the obvious, pretty much every human community that ever existed have had concepts of the feminine and masculine as collections of desirable traits. This entails that men and women who refuse to live up to these ideals are disadvantaged in various ways. One way is social shaming. Again, let’s leave it that here; I’m aware that I could go off on dozens of tangents here and add dozens of qualifiers and interpretations to make my argument nuanced and elaborate, but I want to keep this concise.
One way to shame unmasculine men is to use the slur ‘nerd’ on them. This was the norm for a long time in Anglo-Saxon societies, and it sort of made sense. After all, nerds are interested in things and machines, not humans, who are anything but machines. The traits that make you a nerd, especially a hard-working and employable one, are exactly the traits that are useless, detrimental even, if you want to be a socially savvy, sexually successful cool guy. If you’re too boneheaded to correctly read the carefully calculated, covert signals women send out to you to indicate sexual interest without coming off to their social circle as dirty sluts, you’re not a real man. Especially if you’re also not interested in playing team sports etc.
At some point though, the Third(?) Industrial Revolution happens, and the computerization of science and the economy is in full swing. The men most disposed to become computer scientists and programmers happen to be nerds. Before that, programming used to be seen a lowly, dull desk job, basically not different from being a secretary, and a significant chunk of programmers were single women as a result. But now, society starts believing that learning to code is a secure path to having a high-paying career and the American Dream. It seems that only the sky is the limit in the digital revolution and the booming online sector. Young women come to realize that calling undesirable men ‘nerds’ just comes across as dumb and baseless to most people.
However, none of this means, of course, that unattractive male traits just disappeared, or that society is open to abandoning social shaming as a tool of controlling men. In fact, due to an unfortunate combination of the unintended(?) long-term consequences of feminist messaging and socially harmful, pathological trends like online porn addiction, endocrine disruptors, sedentary lifestyles, social atomization, the disappearance of male rites of passage and male bonding rituals etc., it seems that a growing segment of men are socially illiterate, repulsive and dull skinnyfat manchildren. Women no longer want to dismiss them as nerds, but they definitely want to dismiss them as…something.
At this point, due to online trends, society discovers the ‘incel’ term, and just starts using it as a replacement of ‘nerd’, basically. Later, online journos discover that the term was actually invented by some Canadian female college student 20 years earlier who was a romantic failure and started a long-defunct online message board for other college women in the same situation, who applied the term to themselves, not as a slur, and definitely not as something that conveys anti-feminist views etc., but all this is long forgotten and nobody cares anymore, so it doesn’t matter. Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
Botond173
5d ago
Yeah...lol. The current narrative, as far as I can tell, is that the next target of the orcs is Moldova of all places, because reasons.
Botond173
5d ago
That women get a "free pass" from violent conflict is basic common sense, a conclusion reached by any society that isn't actively suicidal.
So not including Israel, I suppose.
Botond173
5d ago
In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.
So I guess these measures are designed to drive these men in particular to apply for asylum in their respective host country, with the expectation on the part of Ukrainian authorities that such applications will be rejected. After all, I can hardly imagine that such measures in themselves will be sufficient to make them return home and sign up for the draft. Am I correct?
Botond173
5d ago
Somehow invading Moldova from a separatist region which is geographically akin to a leather belt in appearance, is landlocked, and bordered by Ukraine on the other side would be the mother of all pro-gamer moves, I guess.
Botond173
5d ago
Who is denying Ukrainian asylum applications now in the West?
Currently nobody, I suppose, but I imagine the Ukrainian government is eager to force their hand.
Botond173
5d ago
They never even reached the vicinity of Odessa. This cannot be taken seriously.
I don't fully understand why Russians are so obsessed with this particular city
Because of the legacy of Catherine the Great. We've discussed this on this forum before.
I find it a bit odd that while John Hajnal has a (concise but detailed) Wikipedia entry, but the Hajnal Line as a concept, in fact, does not, and instead redirects to an entry seemingly arbitrarily entitled "Western European marriage pattern", which appears to have been put together by leftist activists. This applies even more to the entry on Werner Conze, which it links to.
I also find it very odd that Hajnal has no entries in either German, Hungarian or Hebrew on Wikipedia, even though he was the son of Hungarian Jews who moved to Weimar Germany.
On a related note, I find it odd that nuptiality as such has no Wikipedia entry at all, and only has a very short and imprecise entry in online dictionaries. I'm no scholar, but as far as I know, the scientific definition of nuptiality as a concept in demographic studies is the rate of fertile women within a population. As such, the nuptiality rate and its projected change is absolutely crucial to the demographic future of any society.
Botond173
6d ago
The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world.
America didn't always fail at military occupation though.
Botond173
5d ago
The distance between Kherson and the Moldovan-Ukrainian border is more than 300 km though. A very likely target that is not.
Botond173
14d ago
So I read the "The Metapolitics..." article that is linked and while I can agree with its arguments largely, I found this part:
But when a white person has kids with a black person the kids will almost always see themselves as black. This isn’t “the cultural legacy of the One Drop Rule,” it’s the obvious fact that black people have much more dominant genes than everyone else.
...which strikes me as kind of pseudo-scientific nonsense.
The obvious reason those kids will see themselves as black is that the Spanish/Hispanic (and, I guess, French/Francophone) cultural sphere, unlike the North American Anglo-Saxon one, includes the concepts of mestizo and mulatto, and accordingly lacks the legal concept of the white race as the separate and dominant racial group, which originates from Virginia in the late 17th Century, as far as I know. It has everything to do with the cultural legacy of the One Drop Rule. Those kids, if born in Britain, France or Spain etc., will not see themselves as nonwhite, because their societies lack the concept of whiteness as an identity.
Botond173
5d ago
The Moral Majority indeed got a lot of attention. On the surface it could indeed appear that the Christian Right is influential. But the social reality was that the abortion rate, the rate of adolescent sex and alcohol consumption, violence, and teenage pregnancy were all peaking in the late '80s and early '90s. It was also the time when the distribution of porn in VHS format was becoming normal in the first place.
I'd say the decisive factor was the armistice in 1953, and the Americans not leaving. The war was never terminated in a clear manner, and was instead transformed into the mess that persists to this day, with the DMZ and so on. Had the North Koreans been capable enough to successfully and swiftly reunify the country through force, as it happened in Vietnam, Korea today would be a more or less normally functioning, average Asian nation, as Vietnam is. This'd be preferable to the current situation. One consequence of American military presence was the widening exposure of the populace to American cultural concepts, such as radical feminism. Also, there wouldn't be any Sarah Jeongs in the US.
Another factor was the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in 1979, which the Americans probably had some role in by either abetting it or supporting it. If there was one South Korean leader after 1953 who had both the willingness and ability to turn the country into a more or less normally functioning Asian nation without the current social dystopia of implemented cyberpunk, it was definitely him. If given 5 or 10 more years, it might have worked. But it was not to be, and he was replaced by a stooge of Washington.
More options
Context Copy link