DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
This is a more generous assessment of Jim and his ilk than I'd be inclined to give. I think there's less foolishness there and more evil; the pursuit of a good end by bad means has long since given way to a pursuit of a bad end by bad means. I don't think that Jim merely disbelieves that stabilization, security, and sound life decision-making can be achieved by loving relationships; I think he deplores loving relationships in a vacuum. There's some kind of tipping point you often see people running over where reasonable paternalism gives way to an all-consuming hatred.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Perhaps you could compromise by making it more aware that it's bullshitting so it can say so explicitly? Surely "I don't know, but the best I can come up with is X" is better than just "X", for a bullshit X.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
It seems to me a perverse situation that our society, which is largely built on enslaving the younger generations to the older, seems to do by those close to death so poorly, I suppose because its idea of serving them is based around throwing money in their general direction and not in any form of respect. This reminds me of the point C. S. Lewis often made that it's in the nature of sin to offer some real good end in exchange for bad means, and then to not even deliver on it.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys?
Many of them do; I suspect a dynamic (broadly) symmetrical with AGP-vs-HSTS.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
No one I or anyone else I spoke to recognized, at least.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
This point reminds me of one of the more bemusing points from my adolescence, which was that during unusual hours, it was relatively common for creepy adult men to sit in their cars around my school and film children and teenagers. They had the angriest, most hateful looks on their faces when they did it. I don't think that they were even (mostly) pedophiles, they came across more as busybodies and paranoiacs, with their attention more directed at boys who could plausibly be mistaken for a threat than at girls. It was a very nice school, too! Just a small and relatively well-hidden-away one that these people could convince themselves was just a random building where teens were congregating and loitering for no reason.
To be fair, though, maybe they actually were pedophiles and they just got those looks on their faces because they noticed that I noticed them. Who knows. Old memory.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
You'll occasionally see a particularly tonedeaf Muslim blame Rotherham on the girls, or a particularly fervent supporter of prostitution do the same re:Epstein.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Sorry, misparsed phrase there, I meant the real incident itself.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but what the fuck are you talking about? It isn't even a good AI-generated image. You were hyping it up and I was wondering if when I clicked on your link I was going to see some kind of incredible cognitohazardous superstimulus version of the real incident (which I had already stumbled upon, found evocative in a vacuum, and now find even more evocative given the context). But what you've actually given me is like a low-rent obviously-AI-generated Ben Garrison knockoff. Get a grip, man.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday.
An important distinction here: "modern female character design" does still produce characters with lots of bad points, but not on purpose.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
There are so many layers of doublethink about it, but like many other bits of feminist media criticism, "men writing women" complaints are fundamentally horror at the thought that a man might ever have sexual thoughts about a woman without permission (both her permission and the permission of You, The Female Observer). Any realism concerns are a fig leaf. All of this is trivially revealed, say, when women make a "men writing women" complaint and are then embarrassed to discover that the writer was a woman writing for women about her real nigh-universal woman experiences which they already knew they shared when making the complaint.
Closely related: women policing "unrealistically" attractive female characters as a crude disguise for envy that they're prettier than them.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I have my doubts about the simple version of the "pandering to girls" hypothesis because the particular thing about the sequel trilogy that girls seemed to find most appealing (the prospect of a romantic relationship between the heroine and the villain) was entirely an accident and they ultimately clumsily failed to exploit it; the real audience they were trying to pander to, an unhealthily sexless sort, finds romance just as icky as "boys" do.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
...that's eerie. I feel like this detail does actually enhance the narrative, and somehow the fact that you chose to leave it out of your initial telling actually further enhances it.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
In the context of the death penalty, the US Supreme Court has held that mentally disabled offenders are not smart enough to understand deterrence
...wait a minute, what? But the entire point of deterrence as a justification is that you're not trying to deter the specific crime that actually happened, but rather comparable crimes in the future. I have non-zero sympathy for the "less morally culpable as regards retribution" argument, but deterrence would surely be an argument against this class of defense, not for it.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Don't know if this is a real dream or a story you wrote, but either way it's a high-quality bit of moral instruction and prophetic vision.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
As far as I can tell, it doesn't even look as much like aliens as the earlier weird comet!
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
And more importantly there is no way a world on the verge of extinction with massive attrition due to a constant multi-generational war against monsters is going to end up progressive, especially with regard to gender roles. They are going to want women pumping out as many kids as possible so they don't go extinct. Or rather, any subculture which chooses to be progressive in any way that reduces birthrates (as opposed to some free-love variant that encourages promiscuity but discourages birth control) will quickly die out and be replaced under such strong selection pressures.
This sounds like you're gesturing to a plausible culturally-prescribed use of such a spell that would be quite anathema to both our trads and our progs: fix your society's undesirable sex ratio with magical sex change as opposed to (or in addition to) war.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
While there's often an unfortunate association there, I don't think that the problem is so much inherent to the grammatical qualities of the perspective as it is the thoughtlessness the author employs in selecting any perspective at all. This is closely related to the oft-commented-upon "books as wannabe movies" problem.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I see plenty of merit in points 2 through 5, but as has already been noted I think you at least chose a weak example on point 1.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
Ethics aside, it makes sense as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to making Hamas go away, although it would be a lot more workable if there was an escape hatch available for people to leave Gaza and move anywhere else in the region. Theoretically, a bad enough famine would depopulate the entirety of Gaza and eliminate Hamas that way, but this would be very bad for Israel's international standing compared to a scenario where Gaza is depopulated in a less deadly way.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
In my experience, the people who get angry about their ID getting checked aren't really correlated with race. It's mostly old men who are upset that they're aging and aren't even getting the consolation prize of not needing to get their ID checked.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
"I'm sorry sir. I just have to scan the ID of anyone who looks under 30" (guy looks 17)
Despite the presence of a posted sign that says that we only have to check the ID of anyone who looks under 40, management requires that we check the ID of everyone period. I'm honestly not sure how much of this is that management thinks we're too retarded to estimate people's ages and how much of it is management figuring that it'll offend people (mostly women) for us to estimate that they look over 40 regardless of accuracy.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
I, for one, am strongly in favor of calling these people actors and actresses, not out of respect towards prostitution but out of disrespect towards acting.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
I get some sort of autistic pleasure from obfuscating language
That doesn't sound very autistic at all, actually.
What if the media just drops the mask and starts explicitly praising murders like this, explicitly calling for a race war to exterminate or enslave whites, etc?
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