Crowstep
1mo ago
I really don't think Zendaya was mere diversity casting. She's a popular actress and her character is described in the books as being 'skinny, with an elfin face' and having 'darkly elfin features'. When I heard she was being cast as Chani, I immediately thought she was the perfect choice. And if we're in agreement that the Fremen should have been Bedouins, well, here's what a real Bedouin girl looks like. You can hardly claim Zendaya is too dark to play the sci-fi version of her.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I'm pretty sure demand for fast food is much more elastic than you're suggesting. You can't use misanthropy as an excuse for ignoring the fact that consumers do respond to higher prices and firms respond by lowering them.
Crowstep
18d ago
If the annexed territories are ‘officially’ part of Russia, why hasn’t Russia nuked Kiev for invading its sovereign territory?
It’s a bluff, it always was. If NATO tanks roll in from Poland, Russia will choose retreat over nuclear Armageddon.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Your premise rests on the assumption that AI and robotics are a magic money cheat that will allow a nation of retirees to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You might be right, and I certainly hope you are. Infinite wealth for humanity sounds great. But on the (perhaps more than) slim chance that technology doesn't go foom and solve all our economic problems, it's probably worth worrying about birth rates.
If only so that politicians don't have an excuse to import millions of low-IQ workers to maintain the dependency ratio.
I'm pretty sure they cast the character as an African woman because the actress playing Chani (Zendaya) is biracial, and if her father is going to played by European Javier Bardem, one African parent is necessary for her ethnicity to make sense.
Although frankly I'd have preferred if they'd recast all the Fremen with Arab actors. It may not be canon, but in my head the Fremen are Bedouin, damnit!
Crowstep
13d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents
Looks like the present tense to me. I assume that you're retreating from your original claim then? Unless you're willing to be even a tiny bit specific about who you're talking about I can't see how it is possible to have a meaningful discussion.
Crowstep
4mo ago
Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I can assure you, the fact that France doesn't measure statistics based on race doesn't mean that it lacks urban dysfunction or racial grievance. In fact, I'm not sure if this policy makes any practical difference compared to other European countries that do measure this stuff.
And while police and other organs of the state may not officially measure race or ethnicity, they do measure 'where your grandparents were born' which is effectively the same thing.
Crowstep
5mo ago
I'm wondering how to square this with the data that suggests that modern parents do way more parenting. Apparently modern fathers spend almost as much time on childcare as 1960s housewives.
Children seem to have had more freedom 50 years ago and were less neurotic. It seems more intuitive to me that overparenting would contribute to poor mental health than the wrong kind of parenting.
I've heard it myself a few times from young women, although I would describe it more as a flippant comment, in the vein of 'Oh, big oil will never let electric cars succeed'. I'm not sure about the extent that they literally believed it.
I also saw the 'I wish exceptional women had the confidence of mediocre white men' meme just this morning from a woman who literally has a PhD.
Crowstep
6mo ago
My metric for judging demographic swaps is how much it breaks the universe the adaptation is set in. For example:
Retelling a Shakespeare play, but setting it in the context of 13th century Chinese court politics. Sounds fun.
House of the Dragon: One of the Valyrian clans is inexplicably African, but otherwise genetics works as it would be expected to. Tolerable, but it would have made more sense to have that clan be merchant lords from the Summer Isles.
Rings of Power: Every race (in the sense Tolkein used it) is inexplicably multiracial. Children don't inherit phenotype from their parents. Commoners use racial slurs about elves having pointy ears but pointedly ignore their complexion. Parts of middle earth where the people are canonically swarthy have the same clunky racial mix as everywhere else. Bad.
Netflix's Cleopatra: Cleopatra, a real historical person who was Greek and looked like this, becomes YAS SLAY AFRICAN QUEEN! Terrible
Crowstep
26d ago
Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.
Were you listening to the Kenneth Branagh version? I think his reading is amazing but I haven't heard any others.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I think you'd do better to emphasise personal risk to him. In the vein of 'she clearly has a high libido and seeks sexual novelty, how do you think she'll react when she gets tired with her married sex life?'
Appealing to (your) revulsion or asking him to not marry the woman he loves because of abstract second order effects isn't going to help.
Crowstep
2mo ago
My gut is that we'd see more male misbehaviour rather than less. Women have a civilising effect on men.
I would expect a situation with more women would lead to more promiscuity and less stable marriages, more children born out of wedlock, and generally more rootless lives among underclass men.
Crowstep
3mo ago
60% infidelity seems insanely high. Figures from the UK* show adultery given as the reason for divorce by 7.5% of men and 8.7% of women. Crime victimhood figures show 5% of adults being victims of domestic violence. Either Americans are far worse than I thought or those figures are wrong. My money is on the latter.
*It's worth noting that until 2022, the divorcing partner was forced by law to given a reason for divorce. Hence most divorces were either codifying separations that had already happened (one of the reasons allowed) or recorded as 'unreasonable behaviour', which was the essentially the dump stat for amicable divorces.
As a disinterested atheist, it seems pretty clear to me that the Vatican is just trying to slow-walk gay marriage. I'm sure they'll do it bit by bit, with just enough continuation between each change to avoid getting called out too heavily, but the end result will be rainbow flags in St Peter's Basilica.
I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church? Would they just be another protestant denomination at that point? Can they appoint their own Pope? Or get one of their own elected to the Papacy?
This Reddit thread is hilarious. A handful of posters acknowledging what this is, another handful criticising the Vatican for ambiguity (as if this wasn't part of the plan) and another group saying that it doesn't technically involve blessing gay unions so there's nothing to see here.
Crowstep
3mo ago
I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.
If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.
The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.
Crowstep
5mo ago
Refugee is just a modern euphemism for illegal immigrant. Hence why thousands of Albanian men who wash up on the southern shore of England are called 'refugees' by the open border crowd.
Crowstep
3mo ago
The Gulf states do not have open borders. You can't work there without a visa, and they aggressively deport visa overstayers and foreign criminals.
Plus they are not democracies, don't give citizenship to foreigners (or make it extremely difficult to get) and don't give welfare to non-citizen residents.
The Western countries that we're talking about are democracies that rarely deport illegal immigrants or foreign criminals, give welfare freely to both legal and illegal immigrants and give out passports like candy.
Crowstep
4mo ago
I noticed it in a previous relationship I was in. Women my age (late-20s) were unhappy to see me dating a girl six years younger. I think they were unhappy to see a guy from their cohort with a younger women, since that norm (if tolerated) would allow the men they were interested in to date younger. That would fit your assumption about mate competition.
This study suggests that people disapprove of both older man and older woman relationships, but that the power imbalance assumption only holds for the older man relationships. That suggests to me that there's an 'ew gross' effect for both types of relationship, but the women are wonderful/female hypoagency effect makes the participants assume that a younger woman is being exploited, whereas there is no such concern for a young man in the same situation.
We'd really need to see which people (or realistically, women) are trying to enforce this taboo. My gut would say that it is most strongly enforced by women from 25-35, who have noticed that the beauty they took for granted in their early 20s is starting to decline and who are looking for husbands. Younger women are probably too confident in their looks to care, and older women are having to look at increasingly older men themselves to have a realistic shot in the marriage/dating market.
Crowstep
4mo ago
I'm pretty sure that the number one reason to have a hot girlfriend is to have a hot girlfriend. It's an end in and of itself. Rich men have attractive mistresses in spite of the fact that they absolutely can't show them off to their peers.
The social disapproval I got wasn't from men, it was from women. Honestly, I didn't really get any reaction from men, positive or negative.
No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.
Nazis? Do you believe that Zelensky is a Pythonesque Jewish Nazi or are you using the Russian government's definition of Nazi?
Crowstep
3mo ago
Seems unlikely. People drank a lot in colonial America, something like three times as much as moderns. My understanding is that the Puritanesque turn against alcohol was a reaction against that, and was carried along by one of America's regular religious revivals.
Crowstep
4mo ago
They're fighting to not be genocided
The millennials are the children of the boomers, they are going to inherit those expensive houses that the boomers are living in. Some people think that they will end up being the wealthiest generation who have ever lived.
But yes, I'm sure that millennial pension schemes will be drastically less generous than their parents get now, due to ageing populations and the fact that those pensions were never sustainable to begin with.
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