Ecgtheow
9mo ago
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It'd be nice to have some stats on this, and I'm not broadly in contact with teenage girls but interacting with the younger generation of women in my family (nieces and some considerably younger cousins) I was taken aback by the interest in "nerd culture". There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit, but the rise of D&D youtube/podcasts seems to have gotten a couple of them playing 5th edition. The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
She's accurately identifying the state of play. The right isn't gonna accept trans people no matter what at this point, when you start calling people pedophiles the conversation is kind of over.
I don't think the tactics of trans activists matter that much electorally. Us political obsessives can fight all we want about trans people but electorally it's all gonna get swamped by abortion/inflation among normies.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
You can freeze sperm and eggs before the transition and then have a surrogate bear the child. Let's say some billionaire has a trans kid and creates a massive free sperm/egg preservation service and covers the cost of surrogacy/artificial wombs in 2040 for all trans people. Is the issue resolved, do conservative parents suddenly become okay with their kids transitioning knowing their genes will live on? Who is a conservative parent more likely to keep in their social life, an unmarried childless cis straight son or daughter, or a trans kid in a T4T marriage with a biological child?
Obviously not, because the issue isn't actually fertility (which is massively declining among cis people too). It's an aesthetic/social/moral revulsion at transness.
Ecgtheow
8mo ago
I think the old concept of masculinity is less benevolent than you're construing it. If women are dependent on men to provide the necessities of life and physical protection then men hold substantial power over women. Without doing a massive cross cultural study I think it stands to reason that the physically stronger member of the relationship who provides the calories/income gets their preferences catered to more than the weaker member who in a pre-industrial world would be pregnant and physically dependent on their partner for prolonged periods of time. Cultural norms surrounding relationships evolved over centuries where men had substantially more power than women.
What's happened recently is that first industrialization and now the shift towards a service sector economy has largely equalized economic power. Guns and the modern state reduce the value of a husband's physical protection, and the gender wage gap is pretty minimal once you control for career choices. Feminism's defection from the old marriage bargain is only possible because the old marriage bargain was produced by a difference in economic power that no longer exists.
My read on this is that the masculinity influencers are pushing for a return to the old bargain under an individualist framework. Go out and make so much money and become so physically powerful that there will be something approximating the pre-industrial power differential and you can get a young wife who caters to your preferences. Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less. Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
"Let's sterilize all the Jews" is extremely different from "we'll let ~1% of the Jews voluntarily sterilize themselves".
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Conservatives are quite capable of lawfare and they have a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court majority. If 'intent to intimidate' rulings were shutting down conservative political rallies around the country they're quite capable of funding legal challenges and appealing their way to a court where they have a sympathetic majority.
The cynical view is that Conservative legal elites are completely fine with having their embarrassing white nationalist fringe suppressed and don't expect the statute in question to be applied broadly. The less cynical view is that this guy was charged because he was part of a group that surrounded some counter protestors and is alleged to have menaced them with the torch, which means he's being punished constitutionally for interpersonal intimidation and not political speech.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They even showed it in years past with a permission slip and just forgot to send out the slip this year. It's a paperwork mishap elevated to a firing offense because of the ongoing culture war over parental rights.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Well so far no one who actually is a father appears to have responded but a lot of people reported to the mods. That's pretty funny, though I expect eventually a father will respond. Has there been a demographic survey recently, does it ask about children?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Do we have good demographic surveys of sci-fi readers? Anecdotally it seems like women read more than men, and surveys of fiction readership that I googled in the last five minutes say a larger share of women read books and they read more books on average. Is the reason that books about woke mom's saving the world is that woke mom's are becoming the modal reader? Or at least that women are the modal reader and women are disproportionately likely to be woke and or moms.
Wokeness is usually understood as a top-down imposition of "the cathedral" (or at least the HR department), but genre fiction taking on the characteristics of women's fiction as women become the majority of fiction consumers seems like a bottom-up process.
A relevant fact that I don't think has been established is what the typical outcome is for a drug user who says "no" to question six on form 4437 (which asks if the purchaser is "an unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana or any depressant or stimulant drug") but isn't charged with other crimes. The fighting has mostly been Democrats suggesting that since felons who "try & lie" on form 4437 aren't prosecuted it's unusual for Hunter to be prosecuted and Republicans rebutting them and saying that Hunter is different since he actually got the gun where "try & lie" felons are denied. This still leaves the question unanswered of what is the typical outcome is for a drug user who lies and successfully obtains a gun but isn't charged with other drug-related or violent crimes. Can anyone provide examples of someone who did a similar crime and compare what penalties they faced?
The Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee put forth an interesting example of a tax case that closely fits what Hunter did. Steven E. Smiff was a Florida Lawyer who didn't file taxes from 1997-2011 for the ~8 million in profits from his law firm. He paid the back taxes and got thirteen months in prison. Hunter didn't pay taxes for two years on roughly three million, paid the money back, and got two years probation in conjunction with the gun crime. Hunter's offense seems less severe since it was 1/7th of the years and 1/3 of the money, but maybe he should have done four or five months for failing to pay. It does look like Hunter got off a bit light for the tax stuff, but if that's the closest comparison a Republican congressional research team can find then the five years jail per count that The National Review suggests was never on the table.
It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.
I think FanFic writing rates make a strong case that this is pretty organic. If you look at the video game modding community and it's 80% male and then you look at video game developers and they're 80% male do we need some big hiring practices conspiracy to explain it? There aren't institutional barriers to putting your Skyrim mod up on the Nexus or Steam Workshop or putting your fiction on AO3 or fanfiction.net. This survey of AO3 Users says they're 80% female, this study of fanfiction.net says people who joined in 2010 were 76% female. Goodreads has a 76% female userbase, though that's book reviews not fanfiction.
This NBER paper has a graph of share of books authored by women. It bounced around 10% for the 19th century and then begins a steady linear increase starting in the 1970's breaking 50% around 2020.
Are there many media forms where if the consumers and amateur practitioners are primarily one gender the producers remain the other gender? It seems like once most readers are women, then probably most writers will be women, and eventually, most editors and publishers will be as well and this generational overturn is to be expected. These spaces are woke because they're women-dominated not women dominated because they're woke.
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways.
I'd put slightly better odds on women understanding men than vice versa. This is some weak back-of-the-envelope evo-psych but generally, I'd expect there to be stronger selection pressure for women to be able to predict and manipulate male behavior then vice versa, since they are physically weaker, calorically dependent, and extremely vulnerable during pregnancy. If early men wants something from early woman (say monogamy) violent coercion is an option, whereas early woman can't really coerce her partner unless she can get the whole group to do that for her.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If I were an unarmed elderly man alone with a crazy guy with a hammer my strategy would be to de-escalate the situation as much as possible. Act calm, and normal, keep the crazy guy (who said his plan was not to assassinate Pelosi but to interrogate her) talking until the police show up. Maybe offer him a drink, or have a drink myself to give the impression that the situation is normal.
Is that the modal outcome when a potential assailant breaks into an elderly person's home? Probably not, but it seems more likely than a major police department being so bought off it would coerce a lengthy false confession and continued silence from DePape in an extremely high-profile case. "Elderly guy has a drink in his hand during home invasion" also seems much more plausible to me than "extremely rich man hires a chubby neckbeard guy who posts right-wing manifestos as a gay prostitute in the #1 city for gay prostitutes, then pays him so little the guy comes back and murders him with a hammer"? When I saw these memes I assumed the guy was hot or something but good lord.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Isn't the idea that gender is more biological than race an argument in favor of transgender being acceptable and transracial not being acceptable? Biology can be altered by taking hormones that have a variety of physiological and psychological effects. Get a dark spray tan and dreadlocks doesn't have the same sort of effect on the transitioning person's physiology and psychology.
That's something of a 'trans-medicalist' perspective, most trans activists wouldn't endorse the idea that you have to take HRT to be legitimately trans. I think that's mostly for 'big tent' solidarity reasons, most trans people won't shut up about how much hormone therapy changed them.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
It's specifically a statute against intimidating people with burning objects written for the KKK and now applied to this Tiki Torch guy. I'm not sure how broadly that will apply given most political speech doesn't involve burning objects.
The civil rights takeaway is bizarre. Pro-segregationist southern states set the laws MLK and others were tried under not a vague, establishment. The whole point of the protests was to be arrested in order to produce news footage of well dressed non-violent black people being dragged away from lunch counters. If you look at cases like the 'Friendship Nine' they had the option to pay a fine and get out or do hard labor in prison and they did the hard labor and stayed in prison. King's most famous piece of writing was produced in prison. Jailing civil rights protestors for the six months this guy is set to serve doesn't look like a silver bullet that would kill the movement.
Ecgtheow
8mo ago
If you want to marry an educated woman with ~92% of your income potential and expect them to forgoe most of that income by raising your kids you have to accept worse terms than your grandfather did when he married someone with 60% of his income potential.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It's not wholly novel, Jon Edwards was charged with a felony for the same thing and was acquitted.
Women's decisions are the big change but women's behavior is downstream of massive change to economic conditions. Gender norms that evolved in economic conditions where women were economically dependent on men, and where the opportunity cost of child raising was small aren't going to survive in a deindustrialized economy where nurses out earn factory workers.
Being the primary caretaker of children, as most wives end up doing, is a really bad career decision. You're committing to a part time job that doesn't build skills you can use in other careers, and you can't move easily between "employers"/husbands. Unlike other jobs where success increases your choice of employers, being a 10x mother probably isn't going to help you land the hot rich doctor if your husband turns out to be a wreck. Furthermore you're expected to make this long term choice at a young age with limited ability to predict the course of your partners future life.
Is signing a 20 year contract with a non-compete clause to do ~30 hours of unskilled work a week for a similarly aged peer in exchange for a share of their future earnings an advisable career choice? Only if you think their future income is much larger than yours would be if you pursued your own career.
Traditional cultures evolved in settings where men's superior strength at manual labor was really important and domestic labor was a time consuming full time job. Now it's not obvious that men always have higher earnings potential, domestic labor has been largely automated, and the nuclear family model means stay at home moms are often isolated. Travel and entertainment is cheap, healthcare education and housing are expensive. For educated people social status comes from career achievement, and available careers can be highly stimulating and meaningful rather than rote drudgery. The opportunity cost of motherhood gets larger and larger and so unsurprisingly fewer women are choosing it.
If the opportunity cost of marriage and motherhood relative to singledom keeps getting higher and higher is it unsurprising women have higher and higher standards for men? If cultural and gender norms evolved under conditions with massive disparities in economic power would we expect them to change if economic power equalized? Aren't men going to have to 'sweeten the pot' and offer a better deal in order to get women to sign that long term childcare contract?
My read on this is that economic power shapes relationships. We have millennia of human cultural evolution where men have had way more economic power and that has shaped the cultural models for relationships between men and women. Now that we have a few decades where economic power has been somewhat equalized those norms are going to start shifting slowly but surely. The question isn't why has women's behavior changed, that's obvious, it's how will men's behavior change to adapt.
I'm not a lawyer and I've been trying to figure out exactly what the standard is for using force in self defense. I read some FAQ from law firm websites and a lot of the issue comes down to whether the threat is 'imminent'. In clarifying whether a threat is imminent these blogs usually focus on timing. If a guy with a knife says "I'm going to stab you", that is an imminent threat you can defend yourself against. A guy without a knife saying "I'm gonna go get a knife come back here and stab you" does not constitute an imminent threat and you have no right to use force until he actually gets the knife and comes back. I haven't found anything on conditionals like "I don't care if I have to kill a F, I will" where it's not clear what he is about to do, or when he will do it, since we don't know what he 'has' to do.
I'm also not clear what the exact duration on 'imminent' is since most of the examples given involve very obvious immeadiete threats like someone running at another person with a knife or baseball bat. If Neely is issuing general threats and a reasonable person might fear that he will assault someone in the near future, but he hasn't threatened a specific person or moved to begin the act of assault does that constitute an 'imminent' threat?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Why might trans people be worried about people who don't recognize them as the gender they identify with banning cross-dressing?
Ecgtheow
8mo ago
Then why do men struggle to find women who want to be homemakers?
My answer is people are status seeking and prefer to marry within their class. Middle and upper class women have unprecedented career opportunities in a society where status comes from career rather than family. The absolute standard of living for home makers has never been higher but the opportunity cost of motherhood is also at an all time high. Lower class women don't face the same opportunity costs but upper and middle class men don't want to marry lower class women and deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.
So going through those examples
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Paul Letts was alleged to have let people cook meth in RV's on his property in exchange for some of the meth. The police raided his property and found 55 guns, equipment for manufacturing meth, possession amounts of meth and Letts later tested positive for Meth. He didn't plead guilty and lost his trial in two days, he had a criminal history and got 57 months in jail.
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Suzanne Wilcox pled guilty after being found at a traffic stop to have drug paraphernalia and a newly purchased handgun. She got time served (five months) and two years probation
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Isca Johnson was found to have marijuana and a gun in his home, he got 21 months jail. This one is weird because it says he was part of a joint state federal operation called "Crime Drivers" which targeted people with warrants out for violent crime, but it doesn't say anything about his criminal history.
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Darion Hayne had a [Edit:] 5.7 x 28mm handgun and 5.4g of Marijuana, he got five years probation with six months home confinement.
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Your fifth link goes to the Isca Johnson one again so I'll add one Sauma Brata Deb got 12 months for illegally posessing two guns.
So just looking at these cases the most lenient sentences available to a normal drug user who illegally possesses a single gun are six month prison or home confinement and two to five years parole. In that context it looks like Hunter did better then a normal person would, but only by a small amount because the penalties for this crime are normally quite small.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Ummm, I've had sex wearing and not wearing a condom and it's noticeably different. Sex with a condom on is still great and guys who pressure women by claiming it's awful are shitty but no, it's definitely not identical.
Yeah so we're in agreement, it's not actually about fertility it's about the belief that transness is fake.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's funny how the "nature vs. nurture" stuff flips political valence when gay/trans issues come along. The right is skeptical of the state's ability to improve test scores and career outcomes for women and (non-asian) minorities but thinks the state is quite capable of convincing people to cut off their own genitals. The left thinks that representation and role models are hugely important in convincing women and minorities to enter male-dominated career paths, but can't possibly influence kids gender or sexual identity.
If "The SFPD is so totally owned by the Pelosi's that they either fabricated DePape's confession or coerced him into a false confession" seems more plausible to you then "an 82 year old had a shitty security system, wore a button up shirt to bed, and had a funny expression on his face in a highly stressful situation" then you have some wild priors.
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