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
8mo ago
I don't think westerners need teaching that racial prejudice is wrong. The obsesssion with race and with racial grievance is driven mostly by people of European descent. The people who wrote this guide were almost certainly majority Britons.
Besides, the idea that only non-westerners ever faced racial or ethnic prejudice and that Europeans need teaching how this feels is absurd. You know that the Russian military is trying to wipe out a European ethnic group/nation like, right now?
Crowstep
9mo ago
Would you rather be an average Brazilian or an average American?
Because that seems to most likely outcome for the United States to me. Not hell on earth, just a very unequal and somewhat corrupt country where anyone with money barricades themselves behind fences and guards. Perhaps add in a touch of third world ethnic spoils politics.
Looking at modern large and diverse countries like Brazil, India or South Africa seems more relevant than comparing America to premodern empires.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I've just downloaded the full collection as ebooks.
My kids can have kindles full of samizdat.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think that the internet really has democratised media. Consider the kind of niche subjects you can find youtube videos, podcasts or blogs about. These are things that simply could not exist pre-internet. Today, you can listed to a podcast about pens (Pen Addict - Relay FM) that has been running for over ten years and has over 500 episodes. Pre-internet, there's no way that something like this could exist on radio or television.
By definition, the most popular stuff on the internet will appeal to the most people and so will be similar to what we had before. The difference is that now we have the niche, obscure stuff as well.
Crowstep
26d ago
When most people say 'work' they mean something like 'provide good living standards for the median person'. Marxists tend not to brag about how communist countries have the biggest armies, although having a huge army is certainly possible when the state (nominally) controls the entire economy and the leadership doesn't have to pay too much attention to the needs and wants of the populace.
Like sure, the USSR worked in the sense that Russia colonised all its neighbours, spent huge amounts on its military, suppressed opposition and built walls to keep its citizens in. It failed at providing good living standards, innovating technologically, creating economic equality (arguably its cardinal goal) or creating a society that wasn't rife with corruption.
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.
Crowstep
7mo ago
That Indian (politicians) in the UK have gone anti-immigration doesn't shock me. As a group, they are wealthy, well-educated, law-abiding and immune to accusations of hating brown people. They're natural Tories. Of course, that doesn't mean they actually reduce legal or illegal immigration, they just talk stridently about it.
What I'm curious about is why so many of the native Tories (Boris Johnson, George Osborne, David Cameron) were so open-bordery. Aristocratic disdain for the native proles? Desire for cheaper servants? Regular cosmopolitan posturing?
Crowstep
1yr ago
Who are you trying to fool with this bait and switch? Most people on here are already skeptical of trans ideology.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think there's merit to the straw vegetarian/vegan trope. I don't think I've ever met a vegan in person who tried to convert or harangue me. However, I have seen them on social media.
I guess that the mediating effect of being in person causes people to tone down their beliefs for the sake of social harmony. One assumes that the growth of the web and social media is what's driving the great awakening, rather than any deeper ideological shift. Freddie deBoer did an interesting post about a book from the 90s that mocked PC types from that era. Their beliefs weren't that different from those of modern progressives.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I would say it's less about Scotland and more specifically about the Scottish National Party. The Holyrood parliament doesn't have to deal with grown up issues, like deficits, foreign policy or immigration. They are guaranteed a constant subsidy from England (or more accurately, London). After the failure of the independence movement, they need to redirect their grandstanding elsewhere or the public will ask what their purpose is.
As for COVID, that was clearly a case of the SNP purposely trying to distinguish Scotland from England. Their model of governing for years has been to create distinctions where none need exist, to be different for difference' sake. For COVID that meant copying the government in Westminster, but being more restrictive on every axis.
Crowstep
5mo ago
If you've ever used Amazon then you have benefitted from Bezos' success. You've benefitted from the consumer surplus generated by Amazon's existence. Whether that is from cheaper goods, faster delivery, greater choice, more convenience, the fact that you've used the website demonstrates that you've derived value from doing so relative to what else was available. The same goes for any other company that you've ever interacted with.
And if everyone's jobs get replaced by AI without any financial recompense, then nobody will have any money to spend on these companies that have done the job-replacing. They would need to compete with eachother for what small purchasing power remains, which means lowering prices to near-zero. This is easy enough when your labour costs have been reduced to zero by the AI that took everyone's jobs.
AI represents a potential increase in productivity, and increasing productivity is literally what economic growth is. From the industrial revolution to now, increasing productivity is why we were able to escape the zero-sum world that existed before.
Whether it destroys the world is another thing, of course.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Serious question, how do you envision the consent-seeking process working for these?
For example, I want to greet or congratulate a male friend. Should I really ask him 'may I slap you on the back?'
Crowstep
1yr ago
Brian Caplan describes it using academic terms:
'Parenting is a pass/fail exam'
Crowstep
1yr ago
I'd like to see (ethnic) Indian leadership lead to a Conservative government actually implementing the policies they soapbox about, but I'm not holding my breath.
Sunak can hardly claim to want to get immigration to sustainable levels while at the same time opening the borders to 150,000 Ukrainians, 150,000 Hong Kongers, 500,000 international students (plus as many as six dependents each). Over the past year the UK has taken more than 1 million immigrants. Talking tough about the rape gangs won't stop lightspeed ethnic replacement and ever more expensive housing.
Certainly, the ethnic minority members of the party are more nominally in favour of implementing some semblance of an immigration policy, which I guess is ironic. But clearly whatever forces stopped Theresa May from getting the numbers down to a sane level are also affecting the current government.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I believe that change was made by Dahl himself. He decided to make them hippies instead.
Crowstep
1yr ago
There is a strain of Scottish nationalism (usually focussed around Alex Salmond and his breakaway political party Alba) that subscribes to the idea that Nicola Sturgeon didn't, or at least doesn't really want Scotland to be an independent country. What she wants is modern lefty politics (of which the gender-ID bill is a perfect example) and is using Scottish nationalism as a means to get it. Actual Scottish independence would require profound financial sacrifices and difficult questions about blood and soil that she doesn't want to answer, according to this school of thought.
The blog Wings Over Scotland is probably the best source for this side of the political space you're going to find. Although I don't agree with the author's politics (being an Englishman and all), he did convince me that the accusations against Salmond were an outright plot by Sturgeon's team to prevent his return to politics.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I can't remember how I was taught, but I can say for certain that children in the UK today are taught using phonics. I've seen my nieces and nephews learning to read and they sound out each letter before saying the word. The conservative government forced all schools to teach phonics from 2010, and this approach hasn't been changed since then.
According to this article, the previous approach was one of 'balanced reading', which seems to be a mixture of phonics and whole language instruction. From what I can gather, criticism of phonics in the UK is based on the same impulses that work against it in the US.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Ashkenazi
Well, Israel **does ** have the highest number of tech startups per capita in the world. With a population of 9 million, it has 97 unicorns compared to the UK's 65 million people and only 43 unicorns. And that's notwithstanding the UK's advantage in being an English-speaking country.
You also have to consider that an increasingly large share of the Israeli population (12.9% at the moment) are economically-draining Haredim, whose menfolk would rather spend all day studying the Torah rather than working. That shrink the economically active Ashkenazi population down a fair bit.
But I wonder if it's simply a case of time. Israel is a young country, and while there's a great deal of ruin in a nation, the corrolary of that is that it takes a long time to build a rich country. Given that it is only 74 years old, maybe Israel's future is a far richer one. Given their high birth rates, I certainly think it's a possibility.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I love the idea of thousandyear old elves doing menial manual labor for low wages for the purpose of...sending the wages back to Valinor??
Crowstep
4mo ago
I was always impressed by the way that my mother was able to bring someone round to her point of view, while making them feel like it was their decision. I would contrast it with rhetoric or debate, which is usually about convincing third parties rather than the person you are talking to. This was more like counsel. Men are better debators, but most of real life happens on a smaller scale where female tact is more useful.
She is also very wise. Intelligent, but intelligent in a way that was practically useful and leads to good decisions, although I'm not sure how female that is.
Thomas-Alexandre was briefly shown in the film as I remember, but I think the actor was full blooded African rather than biracial, which would have been more accurate.
Josephine's maid was also afro-Caribbean, which is plausible since she grew up on Martinique.
But yeah, there were a few other Africans that were thrown in awkwardly. My suspicion is that Scott did the absolute bare minimum to keep the diversity-mongers happy, which is all we can expect from him I guess.
Incidentally, Oppenheimer has a similar 'bare minimum' moment where the camera lingers on the face of an African woman inexplicably attending a 1930s physics class in the Netherlands before never showing her again.
Crowstep
9mo ago
Probably because they're not demanding that people actually use their fake Danish diacritics.
I don't think you can reasonably conclude that Ana de Armas has any non-European ancestry. She's completely indistinguishable from a native resident of Spain. Her mother's parents migrated from Spain, and her father looks completely Spanish.
I compare her to Mitt Romney because while his ancestry is English and hers is is Spanish, both of those places are in Europe and both ethnic groups are equally European. The fact that you classify him as 'white' and her as 'latina' really highlights how bizarre both labels are.
A better solution would be to list 'European' and 'mestizo' on the census. That would more accurately capture the difference between Europeans from Latin America (like de Armas) and mestizos like Raymond Cruz.
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.
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