Crowstep
1d ago
Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.
Crowstep
3d ago
Back when I did judo guys would often talk about 'old man strength', which was really just better technique from the guys who had been doing it for twenty years. They weren't strong, but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.
Crowstep
5d ago
Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could
Is that changing tenses? Consider the sentence 'While running, he saw Steve'. 'While running' modifies the verb 'saw', but it's not present tense on its own. It could also be written as 'He saw Steve while running' which makes it more obvious.
Crowstep
5d ago
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
An asymmetry, sure, but I'm not so sure we can definitively come down on either side. I find catcalling at best trashy and at worst threatening, and I like seeing semi-naked women on the street, but then I'm a guy who got laid when he was younger so I expect that affects it.
But for a lot of men I imagine seeing a semi-naked woman is like a homeless guy seeing me light a cigarette with a 20 dollar bill. Sure, I'm not hurting him, and he's not entitled to my money, but I can see how it would be painful for the homeless guy. In the same vein, rare is the woman who is relieved when she reaches middle age and men stop paying attention to her. Instead she desperately clings on to her youth and tries to stave off invisibility.
I think it's a mistake to see dressing in provactive clothing as a passive act, which is how a lot of women frame it. It's an act with plausible deniability, perhaps, but when a woman dresses like this she does so in the full knowledge of the effect it is going to have on men. All men, not just the ones she's interested in.
My suspicion is that a large part of the dislike of cat-calling (at least among adult women) is the offence that a trashy low-class man thinks he has a shot, as opposed to fear of violence, although certainly that's going to be common, particularly for teenage girls. What I really want is a truthful survey (probably impossible) on how many women feel like this.
Crowstep
6d ago
My immediate thought was those videos of women recording themselves getting harassed by immigrant men (Brussels) or black/hispanic men (NYC) - both women studiously denied the obvious racial angle that everyone else could see, naturally - .
I'm not sure whether most catcallers in the UK would be the native underclass or immigrants, but I'm fine with the police going after either group. Catcalling is an antisocial act, it's not asking a woman out, it's shouting at her in public, very different. If Surrey Police are doing it for feminist reasons that doesn't bother me, it might be good for these policewomen to learn who the antisocial men on their beats actually are.
I wish the police used the same logic in setting up bait bikes to catch bike thieves.
Crowstep
9d ago
But all the same, when your attempts to treat women as people with equal agency and responsibility to you fail miserably for 10 years, and the advice you constantly receive is "Treat them like narcissist/children" and it works... I mean... how do you go back? How do you compartmentalize that back away?
Women have had the knowledge that men are sex-crazed brutes forever, they tolerate us anyway.
I think the issue might be the implict (?) belief that there is some kind of genderless human standard that women (or men) need to meet. There isn't. There's men and there's women, as different as chalk and cheese. Holding women to male standards is like expecting the cat to play fetch. The wise woman doesn't expect her husband to talk deeply about his feelings or know that she's upset even if she says she's fine. You should take the same attitude to women and their foibles.
Crowstep
9d ago
I checked the subreddit when I heard about GPT-5 coming out, I was similarly surprised out how outraged everyone was. I get that people get used to a certain way of doing things. Every UI change will get complaints, but AI is advancing so rapidly that I figured that impulse would be trumped by the sheer improvements.
Having used it, I've found it much better than GPT-4, although I'm not a power user so I couldn't say why. The answers require less refining, it isn't hallucinating weblinks like it was before. Overall just much more pleasant and effective to use. I've even started (secretly) using it at work.
Crowstep
9d ago
Roman pagans were ultimately outcompeted by more fertile Christians. Christianity was so memetically powerful that a middle eastern mystery religion whose founder was executed like a slave went on to become the world's main faith. Islam, arguably a spin-off from Christianity, is the second most popular.
I don't know much about Confucianism or Ancient Greece, but their religious foundations evidently weren't strong enough to last. If you're looking for a religion to hold society together, then it actually needs to survive.
Crowstep
9d ago
How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed?
Studies have looked into that, and there does seem to be a causative effect, even among identical twins raised together. The Japanese are certainly prosocial, but they are also lonely, atomised and have infamously low fertility. Probably if they were as religious as Americans they'd have more friends and more babies.
Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do
The OP was asking why religion is important for a society. Any society with below replacement fertility will eventually be outcompeted by ones with above-replacement fertility. A TFR above 2 the bare minimum for a society to survive, let alone thrive, long term.
Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries
Were. The Islamic Golden Age was almost a thousand years ago. Now there are five times as many books translated into Modern Greek (13 million speakers) than into Arabic (400 million speakers). We can speculate why the Islamic world declined so precipitously. My theory is that Islam brought with it cousin marriage, which in turn brought clannishness and (relative) mental retardation. But in any case, arguing that society would be better if we all embraced Islam because it would lead to more learning and knowledge seems fanciful.
Crowstep
10d ago
I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.
Answering why Christianity is a harder question, but I guess I'd point to the alternatives. Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect (Hindus in India have fewer children than Christians and Muslims). Of those, Judaism you really need to marry into and Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.
Crowstep
12d ago
That's interesting, and it does make me reconsider my hypothesis. I suppose if you've got an obvious state failure (in this case, the government being too weak to take on the cartels, plus maybe a corrupt police force) then gun ownership would be more appealing to the common man.
Crowstep
12d ago
Poland hasn't liberalised its laws, Czechia did in 2021 but then tightened them again last year after the Charles University mass shooting. Austria and Sweden have recently tightened their laws, as has Switzerland.
Crowstep
12d ago
It's not definitive evidence, but it's definitely evidence. The fact that no country on the planet except the UK has something like the NHS is good evidence that a single, national health service is a bad way to run things, because if such a system were good other countries would have copied it.
Similarly, the fact that the entire world has looked at US gun culture and laws and nobody has decided to copy them is evidence that they aren't worth copying.
The European elites all attend the same universities, go to the same cocktail parties etc
No they don't? The European elites overwhelmingly attend the universities in their own countries, like everywhere else in the world. The Anglosphere universities do suck in some of them, but I can't find a single European head of state or government outside of the UK that was educated in a UK or US university.
Socialisation is similarly within countries, for the obvious fact that Europe is a multilingual continent of dozens of countries and elites aren't all jetting to the same city every weekend. British elites socialise in London, French elites socialise in Paris (in French), Polish elites socialise in Warsaw etc.
This is without touching on the EU, and the member states' obligation to implement EU law.
As far as I can tell, none of the authoritarian measures you mentioned have anything to do with the EU. The cancelled election in Romania was done by the Romanian judicary. I'm not sure which arrested opposition politicians you are talking about but the ones that Google came up with (Belarus, Turkey, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia) are not in the EU. Legally penalising speech and building digital panopticons is, I assume, a reference to the UK, which is not in the EU.
Do you live in Europe? Because this reads like someone who just thinks of it as the USA plus funny accents, which is wrong.
Crowstep
12d ago
What about them? They, like the US, have had liberal gun laws for centuries. These aren't recent innovations that have been lobbied for by activists eager to imitate the US experience.
Europe isn't a country. Talking about stuff that Europe is doing is like talking about how Americans love Samba dancing, mate tea and poutine.
On the other hand, if you start breaking down homicide rates by sub-populations, the claims about the "ability to easily kill" start looking less credible.
Surely more credible? Making it easy and legal for your citizens to own guns includes making it easy and legal for sub-populations (you mean black people right? You can just say that here) to get hold of them too.
Crowstep
13d ago
In my mind, the best arguments against guns is to consider opinions on guns in other countries.
In countries where guns are legal, there are lots of people who want them banned or restricted, for obvious reasons that giving huge swathes of the population the ability to easily kill their fellow countrymen will increase the number of people killed.
In countries where guns are illegal, the number of people lobbying to legalise them is approximately zero.
Are red Americans irrationally attached to their weapons, attaching civilisation-preserving significance to them that they don't merit, or are the children wrong?
Crowstep
13d ago
That's fascinating. I knew about mallard forced copulation, but I didn't know that the hens tried to elicit it. Science factoid providers not wanting to victim-blame mallards, maybe?
Reminds me of boxing hares.
Crowstep
14d ago
Anti-recommend The Return, I thought it was pretentious arthouse nonsense.
Fire Walk with Me is the sequel that Twin Peaks deserved.
Crowstep
18d ago
When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest
I realise I'm replying quite late (got here for the Quality Contributions thread) but I don't think this is the case. There are plenty of studies that show that gendered opionions (both positive and negative) neutralise with age. Older women are treated like men. Not worse than men, the same as men.
Shakeri and North found that, in general, women were viewed more positively than men, and younger and middle-aged adults were viewed more positively than older adults. However, when looking specifically at intersections of age and gender, the results revealed a more nuanced picture. Younger and middle-aged women were both rated more favorably than their male counterparts. But when it came to older adults, perceptions of women and men were virtually identical, suggesting that gender differences in attitudes tend to level out in later life. This pattern provides empirical support for what the authors call the “gender convergence effect,” where distinctions in attitudes based on gender diminish with age.
TLDR: Women are wonderful, until they get old, at which point they lose the benefits of their femininity and get treated like men. At no point are they treated worse than men.
Crowstep
21d ago
In the new reporting he "suffers from a “muscle disorder” for which he receives specialized nutrition and physical therapy." and has “cerebral palsy, hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder”.
I wonder if this is related to the Muslim penchant for cousin marriage.
Crowstep
21d ago
How do you square your version of the 'Israeli' position with the fact that 80% of Israelis surveyed want a ceasefire?
Crowstep
21d ago
So what ? Why is it so bad if Hamas gets food ? Blockading food supplies is considered a war crime in the post-war world.
Hamas sells the food back to the civilian population it was intended for and uses the funds to pay its fighters. Israel's new aid systems aims to give food directly to civilians, thereby ensuring that a) civilians actually get the aid (instead of having to buy it from Hamas) and b) that Hamas' funding gets cut off.
The current situation is also compounded by the fact that UN refuses to allow its aid to be used by Israel's system, so it just sits there in trucks. Does this make the UN war criminals too?
Crowstep
21d ago
Sure, the data is there, but it says nothing about what men want, as there is no causal direction implied anywhere outside of editorialized headlines. It does, however, fit the Red Pill box of women 'rejecting' men they see as lesser than them and instead looking for men who make at the very least equal. To that extent it isn't rich men choosing rich women, it's rich women hunting down every single rich man they can.
Why do you assume that only women have agency in this situation? Surely the wealthiest men have the most romantic options (controlling for age)? If millionaire men want younger women, we can assume they can get them more easily than poorer men who are the same age. But what we see is that it is poor men who are most likely to be in relationships with younger women.
That chart is already age-adjusted, which is the biggest factor. Red Americans probably are less healthy, but the death rates for unvaccinated people are ten times those for vaccinated. The effect isn't subtle.
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