EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3hr ago
Almost certainly you are seeing this too late, but on the weird chance you do see it on time: many women do in fact believe that there is no such thing as too many wedding day pictures. Bribe your friends, even literally, to take some candid shots that they can share!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3hr ago
Having kids might change that, but I don't think it will.
Famous last words :)
I jest (mostly). Congratulations!
Another race discussion, another of a slight variant on the same, very contrived "dark road at night" scenario. At some point you start to wonder if it's just a lack of originality, or there really aren't any other similar 'gotcha' scenarios out there. I welcome more substantive comments, if you have them. And I know for a fact there was more you could have responded to there.
Obviously a new spot, fine. No one is pretending that tradeoffs don't exist. Even Jesus, the super (mostly) pacifist, didn't advocate for being an idiot:
I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matt 10:16)
Safety tradeoffs are especially significant. Groups of men alone on the street at night is not a normal innocent thing either, that's somewhat race-independent. And it's also a group-level dynamic, at least mostly. The question is really only tangentially related to morality, and is a straw man. As the scripture says, it's possible to be wise, and also maintain an ethical purity that reveals itself in other situations. Also, we often have more than binary choices available to us, and I think people often underestimate the presence of these third-way options that leave everyone happier.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3hr ago
I breezed through a rough transcript, but found it pretty interesting. Insofar as an internet dude can pass judgement, I think I'm actually going to declare her very much "not guilty" of the charge of discrimination. That's the opposite of her message. I ended up quoting a bit from it because I think there are some interesting nuggets of discussion inside. (I should also note that this video you linked is not the OP's video about NYC guys)
I'll say first of all, she talks about how Black women used to think about Black-Black relationships as "loyalty" but that's by the wayside - good! There's enough problems trying to find a lifelong marriage partner to have to restrict yourself to an eighth of the population (or less) out of some vague, ill-defined sense of loyalty. I think Black Power and the associated feelings were super important to the Black community for a few decades, but no longer serve their best interests so to speak.
If we want to find love, if we want to find a partner who accepts us and loves us, we can't minimize our dating pool to such a small small percentage of the population. Many black women feel they should marry down before they marry out. I explained in the book why black women should not be pressured to sacrifice their own chances for happiness out of some misplaced loyalty to black men, nor should black women feel beholden to black men under the guise of advancing the race. If the price of racial solidarity is a bad intimate relationship, then the cost is too high. Black women should not be held hostage to the struggles of black men, so like I said only dating black men really minimizes your dating pool by a lot. Let's get into some statistics...
And yes, she gets very frank with the statistics. But that's exactly where statistics should be used, yes? At least when assessing what we might call "dating strategy".
She also talks about how Black men have internalized some of the double standards that hit Black women especially hard, and you know what? That's true. I absolutely, positively cannot stand Jasmine Crockett. But I will say that the notion that, as she says, "we are never enough: we're too dark, or we're too loud, we're too demanding, we're ghetto, we're ratchet, we are all of these things" is probably tough - (especially Black) women DO need to walk a bit of a tightrope without any traits that are too "extreme". (Men actually DO have a parallel to this as well, especially when it comes to sexuality, but that's another conversation for another time). And media representation of Black women is an exercise in true whiplash (and yes, Black creators are partially to blame). The problems of race, both "self" inflicted and otherwise, are real, even if they aren't defining. Then we get I think the heart of the rant (apologies for poor formatting but I don't want to spend forever correcting the auto-generated transcript):
You know these guys have been coming with these very clever lines whining since the end of slavery pretty much 'oh my God, I can't possibly do all the things that all the other men do, it's unreasonable to expect it because slavery and discrimination and shit,' yet they think it's perfectly reasonable to expect black women to fulfill all these feminine requirements. You want submission, you want the house clean, you want all the child rearing and labor done, and you also expect us to go out and work? And now it's gotten even worse - I think this was their plan all along, now they want us to pay to have them in our lives. You were expected to subsidize these men like we do not also face discrimination and whatnot in trying to find and maintain work and getting an education and making money. I think it's interesting, you know, being a "baby mama" is very prevalent within the black community, that's where the phrase come comes from in the first place, and it's a very interesting place to be.
So basically she's saying that Black women in particular are tired of having a victim mindset. Great! I agree that's a very exhausting place to be, at the very least on a permanent basis. Does that come with some judgement for the men? Yes. But to me this is still speaking to group-level dynamics, with a dash of normal sexist-like expectations.
...and it feels like far too many black men who date out make it their entire personality and cannot go five minutes without telling the world how much better white women or Latino women are compared to black women, and this is probably the most prominent point of conflict of interracial relationships for black people
This makes me wonder how much of her rant is itself stereotypes, or media consumption, vs how much might be personal experience. I think that would change a bit about how I feel about what she's saying! But alas, we don't really get any extra information here. Her next complaint is, I'm going to be honest, this is just a man thing. It's not a Black man thing:
Where men think they want something, when really they want something else, they just want the illusion of it you know they want the illusion of natural beauty even if it's not natural, even if you are wearing makeup or you have lash extensions or you have extensions or a wig. They don't really care that much as long as they can't tell, but God forbid that you let that man touch your scalp and it's all over
So yeah. Standard complaints with a racial undertone. She's got this aside that's a theory about the specific pairing of white women and Black men:
I actually think that's why black men and white women go together, because they both have a privilege blind spot, where white women they have the privilege of being white, but the experience, the oppression, of being a woman; black men have the privilege of being men, but they experience, the oppression, of being black... so you know those are just some theories.
Honestly? Interesting theory. Maybe even true? I'm a bit skeptical still. But I think when it comes down to her main message it's pretty clear:
I'm not saying oh I don't believe in Black love; I believe in love in general. That's the thing, that's the point really.
I'm going to say this, white men are not the answer. Okay, I am all for interracial dating, you should date whoever makes you happy, that is the point: date someone who loves and respects you, and treats you the way that you deserve to be treated, someone who cherishes and loves you, and sees you for all of your beauty. I'm a little concerned with the pasta Lobster Trend and how it's gone a little too far - like many Tik Tok Trends tend to go - it's like you know oh fun p and lobster it's cute, and then a lot and then women start to glorify white men and they think "oh, white men are the answer, let me find me a white man, um so I can be happy, how do I find a white guy?" It's really embarrassing as black women to be glorifying white men and to be putting them on a pedestal, that is not the point, please let's not set back the black community centuries by glorifying white men, you don't have to get you a p and lobster... you can get you a kimchi and kebab, you can get you a taco, and burrito whatever it don't matter. As long as he makes you happy and he treats your right girl that's all I care about, okay, cuz at the end of the day a man is a man whether he's black, white, asian, Hispanic, godamn it it don't mean shit to me fuck ethnicity, like a man is a man.
Love it. Treat people like people. Endorsed. With maybe a little note of you know, it takes two to tango and put investment in the relationship, but time and place and all that.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4hr ago
See? Again with the "them". (Genuinely not trying to be nitpicky and you didn't mean it that way - a family is a plural noun - but hopefully you'll allow the point.) I'm not talking about "them". I'm talking about specific people. I'm saying that if you see the new black family and then expect them to act per negative stereotypes and then that comes across even when you first meet them and say hi, that's bad. It's true that humans and especially modern Americans aren't super great at "firewalling" the two things, which the whole 'microaggressions' thing was a somewhat deluded and misplaced crusade at affecting, but it does take effort to extend some charity especially at first.
And of course you did list purely and universally negative stereotypes. The family could equally as well bring humor, food, a neighborly sense of watching out for the kids, hospitality, a deep faith, etc. Of course, there are some "culture-clash" values or practices that are a bit more value-neutral than selling drugs/blaring music at 2am/street racing that cause friction, sure. I'm not going to claim that all cultures and practices are of equal value either. But you have to admit starting out with "white = universally good" is not a great building block. I'll still stand by what I said though. It's really not all that bad if that's the true belief you have, but you have to be honest with yourself about whether it might bleed through or not. Only God will judge us by the contents of our heart, for everyone else in society, we have to make do with actual behaviors.
If you get right down to it most of us agree about this, but I think it's really easy to let the politically charged parts distract from it. And it tends to be a more prosperous and mentally healthy mindset to boot, when you default to trust rather than default to suspicion. That's the secret sauce of humanity's success and I don't think tech has changed it too much.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7hr ago
No, see, this is exactly what they were talking about, and my comment above as well. You jumped straight to a factual debate about the stereotypes but that’s not the point. The point is, you have these beliefs about Muslims, fine. You think your views are more accurate, fine. Are you following it up by treating individual Muslims as dangerous and potentially violent as a baseline belief?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7hr ago
Internationally speaking there isn’t a such thing as a neutral observer. Well, there are a few, but they don’t have the media and information collection apparatuses to be useful.
Next best thing is media diet. Financial Times is a classic because its clientele usually like realistic, no-bullshit news because they actually use it to make decisions. Personally I find a mix of The Hill and Politico also helpful, because they are matter of fact about the political behind the scenes action. Sure that’s a degree removed, but you can infer quite a lot about the facts on the ground by observing what the political actors are doing and how they are doing it/phrasing it. Frankly most other outlets don’t consistently cover politics this way, but again, why? Think of the consumer. Politico and the Hill are staples of congressional staffers who also have a vested interest in seeing how the winds are blowing without too much bullshit. At least that’s my 10 cents.
The problem of our modern age is that even very smart people are not very good at divorcing the “group dynamics” from the “individual dynamics”. Motte and Baileys specifically also don’t help here.
There are stereotypes, and many of them are rooted in truth. You may justifiably take some actions that reflect these stereotypes and that’s fine. What’s not fine is the small subset of people who seem to have no sense of tradeoffs - they turbocharge stereotypes with seemingly no upper bound to how powerful these stereotypes are.
Then there are your actions on a personal, individualized level. Meaning usually the recipient of these actions and attitudes. This is the crux of the disconnect. It might be fine for me as a salesperson to avoid marketing to, say, Hispanics. But if a specific Hispanic customer comes in, I shouldn’t treat them differently. Why? Well the most powerful piece is that I consider their identity as a human being to trump their identity as a Hispanic by at least an order of magnitude if not more. The second piece is that we want to live in a society that treats people fairly and sometimes it requires locally suboptimal choices to achieve a globally optimal result. This requires a degree of personal ethics.
If my neighbor goes on a rant about how Black people are bringing in all kinds of crime to the area, I might think it’s uncharitable, or maybe factually incorrect, and I might even think a little less of them… these are societal tensions that are understandable though, in the general sense. I’m not going to treat my neighbor way different based only on that. But it’s a degree of magnitude worse (or maybe two) if my neighbor then deliberately gives the cold shoulder to a Black family that moves in on our block.
Do you see what happened? He crossed the boundary line from stereotyping to personal racism. Which has a word: discrimination. This is a serious moral failing. Whereas the act of stereotyping is relatively speaking vastly more neutral. Discrimination is an action. Sure it might be sourced from an attitude, but there’s a big step there.
The waters get muddied because bad actors (and also overly defensive otherwise good people!) often retreat to the Bailey here. Some might assume that a stereotyper will also discriminate based purely on the presence of a stereotypical belief they hold. This is, well, understandable but bad, a lesser form of the same pattern of discrimination. It also provokes hard feelings because words like “racist” or “sexist” are pretty charged. On the other side of the coin sometimes a discriminator will defend their behavior by pointing to the stereotype as truth. I wish to call this out as bullshit. They are different things with different moral stakes.
And then you have a small handful of people who react to approbation with extremism. Not only are all these stereotypes true, they think, they are strong, they are universally applicable, and individualized discrimination is sometimes not even just a necessary evil but somehow good or wise. There are a few of them on this forum. Only IRL experience can pull them back from the brink, so words can’t really reach them. Usually this is a race thing, but you see the same pattern with the most notorious of incels. Think Elliot Rodger. They take some (maybe rooted in truth!) belief about women but then apply it with such a broad brush to individuals in their lives that it creates a cycle of unhappiness (on top of being unethical).
Anyways, your particular case is a classic. I would argue the woman on the street is fundamentally in a group-dynamic, stereotype paradigm. She is not levying an individualized discrimination. She’s being realistic about a mostly-true stereotype. If she were to follow up her statement with “and so as a rule I don’t date Black guys” then we have a problem. That’s discrimination because it ignores the humanity of individuals (and also creates hard feelings that are often counterproductive on a societal level). I realize this is not always cut and dry (what if she says “and so I’m reluctant to date Black guys?”) but I strongly believe we should save the vast majority of the moral approbation for this kind of specific individualized behavior. Kindness is a bit of a skill.
We (as a society, but particularly this is directed at liberals and moderates) need to (relative to current effort) speak up stronger against discrimination and not so strongly against garden variety stereotypes. It may be true that one leads to the other by tendency and in chronological order, but the focus should be on weakening the link. Conservatives by the same token (relative to current effort) need to call out those individuals that cross the line away from “mere” stereotypes and into outright discrimination better and not hide them behind a shield of persecution, victimhood, circling the wagons, or playing the Bailey card.
Why is gender “better” at avoiding discrimination? Because the link between stereotypes and individual behavior is weaker, as it should be. Women who spout off frustration at “men” as a category are one thing (common), women who treat specific men in their life like dirt because of those frustrations are another thing (thankfully less common and less accepted as morally fine). Simple as that. We should learn from this model and apply it to other areas where discrimination is problematic.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
Far and away the most frustrating ones are when I misspell a variable exactly once in an awkward spot.
Although, R has this thing where the logicals (booleans) TRUE and FALSE can also be replaced with T and F for conciseness (you can pass something like ‘param=T’ without typing the whole thing, which is awesome) … but T and F unlike TRUE and FALSE are not reserved key words! Once I accidentally assigned (capital) T or F as a variable and that was a nightmare to figure out why random things were breaking all over.
The other infrequent but annoying thing is “factors”. In data analysis often you have categorical variables with preset and limited values. You can make these into “factors” but really it’s stored as a named integer vector. Say we are storing HTML codes, 200, 404, whatever. You might in some common analyses cases treat them as strings, and categorical, although obviously they are maybe still ‘numbers’ in your head. If you aren’t careful, you might accidentally write ‘as.numeric(HTML_codes)’ but that will return the integers that are used as internal representations, (like 1,1,2,4,1) rather than the numbers (really strings) themselves. Because they aren’t strings anymore, they are factors as a data type, and R decided rather than have a special unique data type they would just implement it as an integer with metadata (the actual “value” eg “200” is stored as a “name” attribute). Honestly there are good reasons for that, but still a major gotcha. (A very common package import makes this a lot less mistake prone but sometimes coding in a hurry you might forget)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
I’ll yield to experience, but I do want to follow up. Just to be clear: are you sure this would still apply in real fight conditions? As I mentioned, most all grappling comes with some rules for what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and objectives differ. Because in a real fight, it’s probably more “do enough damage to make them give up” not just “make them temporarily helpless” - or even “knock them out” or “attempt to kill them” in other cases. It’s clear that many wresting and grappling and even combat sports evolve differently because they fundamentally have “repeat customers” and need to reach a certain safety and risk (and skill expression) tolerance to make that happen. It’s “sport selection bias” at play. When you were 140 vs 215, what exactly did victory look like?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
I mean just to pick something that has had a very personal impact to people I know, the NSF and related science cuts have basically been Covid-level fallout for higher education and related research. The fact this was done on purpose and even lauded is nauseating. For every person like my friend’s wife whose half-bullshit psych masters degree got derailed by a year or two, there’s two people like my aunt who got laid off from her incredibly important job at a primate research lab that does a ton of stuff on both infectious disease and cancer research, where the whole lab is probably going to close. For all the whining Republicans did about Covid pummeling K12 education with knock on effects for another decade or more, it’s extra astonishing none of them seem too concerned at all that the same thing is happening in slow motion at higher levels.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
Yeah. This has long been my position about the Trump rhetoric and phraseology. It’s brilliant politics, and honestly fair game, but transitions very poorly to governing where people actually do expect government officials to utter things with a stronger relationship to truth. Take Trump’s recent threat about ending civilization in Iran. Facially, that’s a nuclear bomb threat. The fact we cannot tell if that’s what he means or if it’s pure vibes is dangerous. Even if we assume it’s pure politics, it degrades the future ability to rationally assess the official positions of the government and facts on the ground. What particularly grinds my gears is some of the most ardent defenders of Trump around here have taken the simultaneous and cognitively dissonant position that Western civilization is in trouble because it is losing high trust social dynamics. But no, it’s the darn immigrants and their trust-caustic culture that is at fault, or maybe the darn liberals and their moral purity crusades, it can’t possibly be something as simple as the loss of trust from a direct attack on institutions or a President who lies and exaggerated as easily as he breathes.
So, I remember reading this a year or two ago, and I thought it was so apt I'm just going to roughly word-replace it because history rhymes. I mean, it's eerie. In some spots I've simply struck through the original words rather than [replaced] them, because the original bears keeping in mind too.
Bipolar Iraq Iran, By Michael Wolff EverythingIsFine (original here)
Here are the two opposite story lines:
(1) It’s working.
(2) It’s a quagmire.
Let’s fill them out a little more:
(1) [Iranians are hiding and scared; their military is in shambles, their leaders are either killed or too scared to even appear for video messages, their missile production crippled]. By virtually every [military] measure, the state of [Iran is vastly weaker] now than it was during the reign of [Joe Biden]–and it will be even [worse] in the near future. As [military] experiments go–[reducing missile capacity, gaining diplomatic leverage, reducing proxy activity]–there is every reason to be optimistic (and even proud) about this one.
(2) We’ve gotten ourselves into an ever-expanding war with a fanatical and well-armed resistance. What’s more, growing numbers of [attacks on energy facilities and tit-for-tat drone strikes are swamping] this battlefield, which threatens to turn [Lebanon, Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, and the entire Persian Gulf region, and especially the Straight of Hormuz] into a permanent [Iran-sympathetic oil tanker nations] versus non-[Iran] front and international tripwire. We’re stuck in a situation with consequences and financial burdens that we cannot estimate. This is the definition of quagmire. And by the logic of quagmire, the situation only ever becomes more intractable and the consequences more fearful and destabilizing.
As you read those quick précis, your inclination is, invariably, to pick one. They can’t, after all, really exist together. Or, if perchance they do exist together now, one will inevitably come to overshadow the other. Obviously, if you’re a [Trump] person, you choose the former, and if you’re an anti-[Trump] person, you choose the latter. In some sense, in fact, these are not even alternative views of the reality in Iraq as much as opposite worldviews applicable to almost any situation.
(1) There is, quite simply, the patent superiority of the American way. When people are exposed to it, it spreads like a virus. We have not only righteousness on our side but modernity and economic [and military] reality. [Two hundred] billion dollars changes any equation. Everything seems messy, inchoate, ugly, fraught, without organization; but at some point in the organizational process, rationality and benefit will begin to become clear. Upside will outweigh downside. Ambivalence and self-doubt are the real killers here. Long-term investment and staying the course are the solutions and the way to get a big return.
(2) An incredible arrogance chronically pervades the American mind-set. Our lack of self-doubt makes us stupid. We’re blinded to the intractable problems set against us: not just to a deep cultural antipathy but to a million details on the ground that the guys at the Pentagon or at Centcom HQ in Florida don’t have the patience or the language skills or the in-country intelligence to think through. What’s more, because we pride ourselves on “can-do” and turn up our noses at intellectual and abstract analysis, we never really or accurately appreciate cause and effect. We’re always the victims of the law of unintended consequences. Because we’re too big and too quick, we necessarily upset the ecology in ways that will certainly come back to haunt and terrorize us.
(1) Essentially good news.
(2) Inevitably bad news.
Which brings us to the [rescued pilots in Iranian territory]—and before that the attack on the [Saudi Arabian Embassy], and before that the [Kuwaiti base] attack.
The fervent bad-news-ites seem to believe that the BushiesTrumpists understand the kind of mess they’re (we’re) in and are doing everything they can to disguise (spin) it and to blame someone else for it. But the more interesting and complex and difficult possibility is that they don’t see it as a mess at all.
For them, these bad-news incidents represent an illusion created by the small resistance, the leftover [Islamic Republic of Iran and IRGC holdouts]. These thugs and irregulars. What we have here are isolated acts meant to sow widespread fear—it’s just, well, terrorism. The odd thing, of course, is that such terrorism is exactly why we went to war—so it’s rather disorienting to have it dismissed now as somehow inconsequential in relation to the bigger picture.
It’s not bad news, the [Trumpists] seem to be saying, as much as bad PR—or the other side’s good PR. The bad guys have effectively influenced the media coverage without, the [Trumpists] seem genuinely convinced, affecting the reality. [Our military and diplomatic position] gets better and better—except for the fact that these scumballs know how to generate bad press for the Americans who are making [the long term balance of power in the region against Iran] better and better.
Hence the [Trumpists] have countered with a campaign to generate good news. There is even the sense—again, a reality inversion—that the best way to deal with terrorism is in the court of public opinion rather than on the battlefield.
So the good-news offensive. The mainstream media—because it is overly liberal and crassly superficial—is emphasizing the (minimal) bloodshed [and economic fallout] and ignoring the story of a [dominant, overwhelmingly competent military campaign]. And there has been the careful parsing of the story: carving the [Iranian elite] from the rest of a (largely) pacified [rebellious and also humbled] country; rushing in American [marines] (and then [using them as threats]); separating good [Iranians] from bad [Iranians waiting in the wings to revolt].
And, indeed, there has been a sudden rush of not unconvincing good-news accounts. Life was terrible. Life is better. Nothing worked. Now many things are working. Average [Iranians] may not be embracing the American [offensive], but they are sure grateful not to have [Khomenei] around. Life, as seen by [the stock market], [will soon be] returning to normal.
But there are the bodies.
The [Trump] people, as they argue their story line, have to distract people’s attention from the dead. The president doesn’t mention the bodies; doesn’t attend funerals. Body-bag shots [and indeed any video or photos about damage to US bases] are on the media proscribed list. You can sense their frustration in this regard—that the bodies are always, annoyingly, the story. This is partly a military-civilian disconnect. Our job, you can hear [Hegseth] saying, is to minimize maximize [foreign] casualties, not to eliminate them [and certainly not civilian casualties]. In sheer military terms—troops deployed versus casualties sustained—it’s not even that bad. Arguably (although it’s an argument you lose by making it), the kill ratio indicates a big success. I mean, you can’t really fight a war if everybody is precious—if nobody is expendable.
And yet, the great nonmilitary sensibility of the country, and of the media, sees each body as a story, and multiple bodies as a bigger story, and the aggregate of bodies as a really damning piece of evidence.
There is a socio-military calculation on the part of reporters and politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) and, one would assume, military people as well, as to how much is too much. What’s sustainable and what’s a big problem?
When the number of soldiers killed in the aftermath exceeded the number of people killed in the actual war[time it took to reasonably accomplish our initial goals in their entirety], that was seen as a problematic milestone.
When the total number of people killed in Iraq II[this confrontation] surpassed the total number killed in Iraq I[when the US killed Soleimani, in just the first day], that got serious.
Oh yes, and significant multi-casualty incidents are major bad news. Mogadishu levels would be very dicey. Beirut levels in the Reagan era might well put the whole proposition over the top.
Now, what the [Trump] administration is arguing is, in effect, that our enemies know these numbers. That they cannot damage us enough to truly harm us or even to actually hamper our mission, but they can inflict enough damage to frighten us (or frighten you—or frighten the media)—precisely because our tolerance for damage has been set artificially low.
Not least of all by Democrats and by the biased media!
And so we move from a military war to a political one.
This is the exact opposite of the wars of the last generation—of the Clinton[Obama-Biden] approach or even of the first [Trump] administration—that constant and obsessive cost-reward analysis.
Of not being caught out there without a way back. Retreating from Mogadishu[Kabul and all of Afghanistan]. Not following Saddam into Baghdad[Iran's Soleimani retaliatory strikes up with a larger strike, calling it off with 10 minutes to spare]. Of always making the calculation about when the consensus might divide. Of not making people choose sides. Of not letting there be two stories told at once.
The [Trump] people don’t believe there are two sides. Not two right sides, anyway. This mission is sacrosanct. The WMD canard and the sexing of intelligence reports happened, not least of all, to protect the mission [[no changes!]]. Nobody is going to go for broke in an elective war—it had to be a necessary war.
There’s no debate. There’s polling (of course) but no interest in consensus. Stubbornness (Rumsfeldness) is both virtue and strategy. If you refuse to engage in any back-and-forth but just say what you believe relentlessly, repetition eventually changes perceptions.
Righteousness went out of favor in the post–Cold War world (incrementalism, globalism, complex systems analysis came in). But righteousness is surely back. The righteous don’t compromise, don’t negotiate, don’t wimp out. The righteous (even if they had planned not to have to) take casualties (unlike that thoroughly nonrighteous [Biden], who hated to take casualties).
There’s no longer even a pretense that this is about conventional success measures (indeed, failure suddenly seems part—even a necessary part—of the great ultimate success). The we’re-not-quitters stance of the Trumpists (and that the Democrats are, ipso facto, quitters) is explicitly disconnected from any talk about how we’re actually going to win.
The arguable merit of the [Trump] position—life is certainly [going to be] better in [Iran]—is subsumed by its larger, relentless, messianic, and fatalistic ambitions.
We’re at the bear-any-burden stage. That is, in most political terms, a wildly unpopular place to be. We are, after all, selfish, self-obsessed Americans.
So the only way they’re going to sell this is to turn it from a problem-solving issue into an ideological one. “We are fighting that enemy in [Iran] today so that we do not meet [his nukes] on our own streets, in our own cities,” said the president.
It’s a setup. We’re going to have to choose position (1) or position (2).
The Democrats and [Rashida Tlaib] play into that hand ([Trump]-bashing [by TDS-afflicted people] is probably good for the [Trumpists].)
It’s them or us.
Winners or losers.
Lefties or real Americans.
We’ve been here before, and we know how badly it turns out.
Okay, sure, not everything maps cleanly. However, the points about casualty tolerance, the media propaganda games including by Iran themselves, the insistence that somehow things will be better if we can just finish winning, the rapidly spiraling military and (this time also) economic damage with no clear end in sight, heck even talk about boots on the ground as a temporary measure that will surely be the final thing to bring the enemy to the negotiating table, or the delusional talk about how the regular people of Iran will somehow be so empowered by American actions that they will fix everything, the political tribalism, the shifting goalposts for victory, all of these things have pretty clear parallels for us. I'm sure I missed a good parallel or two at least once in there. And also, Michael Wolff was once an incredible writer (what happened?)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
A lot of responses that are non-central to your question. Grip strength, powerlifting, etc. You (originally) asked about fights. It’s my understanding that many if not most fights end up as glorified grappling contests, especially when at least one of the participants is untrained. As such, it’s far more fair to consider fights as grappling contests. Especially when we are talking Black Widow comparisons. Think "half-drunken skirmish outside the bar by people who hate each other". Time and time again most fights pretty soon devolve first into close contact, one or both grabbing the other and attempting punches or other action with a free hand, and then pretty soon it goes to ground. If both people are really out to do damage, at this stage the fight usually doesn't last an incredibly length either.
In this context, a few hard truths. Weight matters a LOT. Like a lot, a lot. Wrestling is very very narrowly sliced up into 10 or 15 pound windows for a reason - and other combat sports too! ~50-60 pound weight advantage is massive that even a very skilled grappler will have trouble with. This is not linear: say a 20% body weight advantage is big, a 50% advantage might be insurmountable. Critically, in uncontrolled grappling, the skill advantage is even weaker, because there aren't really "rules" limiting what you can do. Remember that body weight scales better than muscles do, essentially, in humans. Why weight? Mostly, inertia, though bulk can help. Sheer mass makes it more difficult to be swept, moved, submitted, etc and it doesn't usually take much skill to leverage weight offensively either. Moving a huge weight is really exhausting. Factor #1 is almost always weight.
Now, I know you said "I'm making sure to equate the sizes of the woman and the man" so forgive me if I've gone off on a tangent, but "all else equal" isn't very realistic. Pure weight matters more than almost anything else, and weight differences are pretty common. The other things are more fun to talk about, and sometimes have culture war implications, but weight is the boring but accurate answer.
Gender is probably #2. Upper body strength is actually pretty important in grappling, and men have more even just proportionally, plus men with their broader shoulders and generally longer limbs and height (even denser bone!) can have some real substantial advantages in leverage, which is a force multiplier. Men have better muscle fiber density and explosive power. All else equal, it's probably true that a gym-trained woman can beat an untrained man pound for pound, but even a bit of training erodes that.
Skill falls probably down to #3. As mentioned, chaos is less kind to skill than sport is. Okay, one caveat: I think pound for pound skill probably comes above gender (!!). But skill scales much, much worse. Most fights, again, are not pound for pound. Your question is fundamentally asymmetrical: how much does the skill of a very fit woman impact her fight chances?
Gym training is probably #4. It's real but usually overstated. Functional strength encompasses wider ranges of movement, better positional awareness, flexibility, etc. It's fun but unrealistic to isolate this completely from #2 as well, as we do use our muscles regularly in daily life, not just in the gym. Many men use muscles in their work or leisure. So gym training has some limited upside, and we all know that you get up against diminishing returns pretty easily.
So, a few illustrative matchups:
-
170 pound fit regular guy vs trained 170 pound trained grappler. Grappler wins north of 90% of the time. Skill is super potent when things are roughly balanced.
-
170 pound pretty good grappler vs 240 pound untrained but not pure fat regular guy. That's a big ask, probably near the tipping point I think. On the feet the bigger guy can just fall on the grappler. Bigger neck, wrists, legs all make pins harder and escapes can be exhausting.
-
140 pound fit very trained woman vs 150 pound untrained but healthy guy. The woman wins a pretty large chunk of the time. Competitive but not dominant - grips on arms are hard to get out of, in the chaos of an uncontrolled fight raw explosions of strength can be a problem, but if she's willing to fight dirty and is smart on her feet she should be able to do fine.
-
200 pound top tier male powerlifter vs 185 pound guy who did a good amount of wrestling in college 5-10 years ago. The lifter is crazy strong and has amazing grip, posture, resistance, etc. But the wrestler has spent years shooting levels, sprawling, controlling wrists, and understanding base. The lifter doesn't know what a double leg feels like coming at him, has no hip defense, and will be exhausted in 45 seconds of real scrambling. The wrestler wins this handily.
On top of all this there's an irreducible source of variability of the chaos of a serious fight. Humans can get injured easily on some uncontrollables. Someone slips, hits their head in a weird way, uses a makeshift weapon, makes a passionate error, all this means there's usually an upper limit to how dominant any single person can be. I think this is actually the silent killer, the black mark against a Black Widow: sure, maybe she can take down 4 guys in a row especially with surprise at her back, but it only takes one time to mess up when the margins are thin and so maybe a fifth will go wrong.
(I didn't talk about tech or weapons, of course, that's a whole other ball game. Black Widow has like, stun guns and stuff, but also guns exist for everyone.)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d ago
Why is this narrative making the rounds? Yes, okay, Netanyahu and a few of his allies wrote articles supporting an Iraqi invasion, and Israel shared some intel with us, but there's also a pretty large body of evidence suggesting that a lot of Israelis (especially government officials as opposed to pure politicians) felt like it was a distraction from the 'true threat' of Iran, the Axis of Evil member they cared a lot more about. No one seriously believed that toppling Iraq would weaken Iran, after all. And as history proved this notion was indeed idiotic; Iran profited greatly from Saddam's downfall and Israel pretty directly suffered as well as Iran-sympathetic militias and religious groups gained greater control. On the whole there's really no good argument that Israel puppeteered us into Iraq.
Afghanistan? Sure, Israel supported it (happily). So did almost everyone though (at least in general). Other countries and their populations disagreed about how militaristic the response should be (and how quickly the US should have reached for that option), and certainly weren't as gleeful, but the notion that Israel effectually egged us on is extremely skimpy on evidence. In Afghanistan we had invoked Article 5 with NATO, had UN backing, had an obvious grievance, etc. and it's absurd to suggest Israel possibly could have meaningfully moved the needle there.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d ago
I think it's more a result of the gaping hole here of anything resembling a mainstream liberal. There's plenty of non-anti-semitic anti-Israel people that exist, but this place is kinda warped.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14d ago
I find the idea that one genocide is bigger than the other is somehow capable of disqualifying the smaller one as a genocide as pretty facially ridiculous. As is the claim that genocide requires complete elimination of the targets or that somehow high birth rates also are disqualifying. This is not a genocide thread nor do I think it should become one, but you should do yourself a favor and don't include a bullet like #5 if you aren't going to be serious about it. The question of outsize attention to Israel is pretty self-evident despite this all, I think even the most strident pro-Palestine Westerners would probably even agree if pressed that Israel gets more political attention than you'd normally expect (for different reasons of course, but the point stands).
Now obviously I agree with your central thesis; I'm the one who believes in a sort of international statute of limitations, which is about 40-50 years, after which holding grudges is stupid and mutually harmful (most of the instigators are dead by then anyways and anyone in power now very rarely would have been in power then). In that light it's obviously dumb to think that Israel should just go away. And if you look within that window, Israel's efforts at peace have been much more lackluster. Unfortunately the spate of assassinations and other developments around the turn of the century are at least partially responsible. I still personally believe that despite a lack of goodwill all around for the last 2+ decades, it's incumbent on Israel as a nominally free democracy to 'be the bigger man' and at least gesture at a solution, but it feels like there isn't even lip service paid to the idea anymore.
It's worth noting that at least many of the liberals I know usually tend to blame the post-WWI-ish semi-arbitrary drawing of boundaries as the "original sin" of Middle East instability. As the argument goes, there were large pre-existing rivalries and grudges, etc. but because ignorant Western boundary-drawing ignored them, yet at the same time enforced them and gave them weight, these conflicts were nearly inevitable. This is, to be sure, at least a little ironic given some of these same people are very pro-integration including internationally, but 'I think everyone can get along in multicultural societies' isn't actually a core liberal belief, it's mostly just useful feel-good messaging that occasionally gets press-ganged into a political point. (Even some neoconservatives adopted a variant of it for a while there)
Anyways, I probably should spend more time looking for other countries, but for example this survey in Saudi Arabia last year found: 40/33/16/9 split in very negative/somewhat negative/somewhat positive/very positive attitudes toward Hamas. 41/19/27/11 for strongly/somewhat disagree/agree that "the Palestinians will be able to defeat Israel someday". Although with that said, attitudes toward normalization and stuff like the Abraham Accords are viewed very negatively still, they equally DGAF about Iran relations improving.
My point is that even the population in the region basically know Israel is here to stay even if they remain unhappy about it. Internet comments, once again, != reality
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
29d ago
Except (Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT):
I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public. I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are. Here's what I can share:
Maybe the lead is that the war goals DO NOT involve destroying Iran's nuclear weapons program. This is, uh...surprising...since Trump says over and over this is a key goal. But then of course we already know air strikes can't wipe out their nuclear material.
Second, they confirmed "regime change" is also NOT on the list. So, they are going to spend hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars, get a whole bunch of Americans killed, and a hardline regime - probably a MORE anti-American hardline regime - will still be in charge.
Ok, so what ARE the goals? It seems, primarily, destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories. But the question that stumped them: what happens when you stop bombing and they restart production? They hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, endless war.
And on the Strait of Hormuz, they had NO PLAN. I can't go into more detail about how Iran gums up the Strait, but suffice it say, right now, they don't know how to get it safely back open.
You are right that Hegseth agrees with Trump:
The mission of Operation Epic Fury is laser-focused. Destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure, and they will never have nuclear weapons.
So, missiles and missile production, fairly straightforward and measurable. Naval "destruction", less. Other miscellaneous infrastructure, obviously not a goal. Deny nuclear weapons? See briefing. It IS, don't get me wrong, a goal, but the only method is: 'hope Iran gives up and negotiates at some point'. That's it. That's the whole strategy. That's kind of a shit strategy, unless we're going to go all WW2 Japan and drop nukes on civilian centers, or some other type of total war shit. (And as mentioned upthread, mutually assured oil production destruction is an option but an insanely bad one)
In other words, there IS a strategic plan but the ACTUAL (tactical) plans we have don't match the grand strategy. At all. IMO, that's enough to fairly claim that there isn't a [real/authentic] plan (functionally speaking).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
29d ago
This is a government that has literally over a decade of practice in collecting taxes, performing policing, and running a judiciary against essentially a partially very hostile civilian population. They are really good at it. The idea that the police or judiciary are going to collapse is nonsensical. This really only ever happens when e.g. police are displaced by another powerful force - either literal revolutionaries (in which case taking over tax and police duties in particular is very visible and obvious), gangs (like Haiti, or some villages or neighborhoods in Mexico maybe), or foreign powers (literal invasions, UN forces, etc). There basically are zero exceptions.
The modern era actually makes revolution significantly harder, not easier, because we have so many bureaucratic tools to administer (or, worst case, defer) typical state functions. In theory, total breakdowns can still happen if a country is widely illiterate with extensive fraud, bribery, local power structures, and poorly maintained central identification regimes (e.g. Afghanistan), but Iran is not even remotely like that. IIRC, their literacy rate is actually very high.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
29d ago
Honestly, it seems to me Iran probably will just send all of its troops on leave for a while if it hasn't already; no point concentrating themselves in flimsy barracks, packed all nice and tight, they obviously wouldn't do this, and they aren't really needed anywhere except maybe a little bit on the coast (no one seriously expects a ground invasion, so why bother planning for it?). I really don't think the IRGC will lose much more than infrastructure, and reading between the lines, any major leadership that wasn't killed probably cannot be killed, otherwise we'd have a lot more high-profile "X is dead" annoucements
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
29d ago
Iran's president, largely powerless during this conflict, apologized and then there was such outcry that he repeated the same type of statement the exact next day taking back the apology. Many people missed this piece of news, and that's a shame, because it says actually quite a lot. So you'd be forgiven for reading a bit too much into it.
Re: mines, ISW says about 10 mines have been laid so far... however, WSJ reports: "Iran primarily sets mines using frogmen on small boats that resemble ordinary fishing vessels, an informal maritime militia of dinghies that is virtually impossible to identify and eliminate". It's also worth noting that you don't actually need many mines to close traffic, just the threat is a big deal and it's fundamentally pretty tricky to get high reliability in terms of "did you really get ALL the mines?"
Re: China, I said this earlier in the week but basically the next few years is a bit of a window where the US hasn't finished fully developing (or critically, deploying) some of the higher-tech or higher-volume clever ideas that they've started working on, since we didn't really get serious about anti-China development until, like, around 2018 or so, planning-wise. US military innovation is generally seen to be pretty good, but it IS quite slow. Troops and assets didn't even start meaningfully shifting to Asia until like, 3 years ago!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
29d ago
Previously, the US had a - not stellar, but decent - claim at being the country (one of very few) that would at least try to do the good thing, even if it sometimes went against their interests. Frankly, I think that's a good reputation to have! Both internationally, but also domestically when it comes to trust. And personally, I quite liked being able to tell some of my extremist leftist friends that they were far too over-critical about the US military. It's becoming much more difficult to say that every year, and I might stop saying it soon.
And beyond that, I don't think the people who go "isn't it good that the military is more responsible than before to who won the election" fully realize the extent that certain kinds of actions by the military, even if facially democratic, undermine the very real, quite impressive, and somewhat delicate set of agreements that undermine the uniquely stable US civil-military relationship. See here for the best treatment of this idea I've seen.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
30d ago
Okay, honestly I felt primed to dislike it, but ended up reading basically the whole thing (I skipped the second half of the disclaimers). And you know what? I thought it was valuable.
Certainly there were things that I disagreed with, contradicted other points to varying degrees from mild to significant, and I think I only spotted a small handful of typos and one or two spots where I think you meant to paste in something else (or were debating doing so), but didn't. BTW, if you want, typos I found: there's an "egrerious" instead of "egregious", "bannable offensives" instead of "offenses", extra "be" in "for women to be have", "(Greater Male Variability Hypothesis)" has parentheses for no reason, all should be findable with Ctrl-F. There's one other misspelling but I can't find it again.
I liked it more than I thought. For some of them, it was good to put a name on, and get some specificity for, a slippery concept. I'm not sure how much it might genuinely accomplish your goals. But I think it might be of use, maybe ironically, as a sort of softer intro to some men who aren't fully aware of the ways in which life can be unfair to them. Despite the inherent bias or risk of a gish gallop approach, of course, in a set of complaints like this. But even so, geez it is hard to avoid the temptation to make it into a comparison game. I know your whole deal is that it's fine to consider men's problems without dismissing those of women, however, on some level if things are unfair for both genders then it kind of implies that, well, that's just life and society, it's tough, rather than assess that there's something deeply wrong and eminently fixable.
A few that stood out: I think there truly isn't very much patience with teaching men to be better at their emotions and recognizing that they frankly just don't have enough experience with it, that's a good point. And worse get judged when they try to develop it clumsily. And yes, men really cannot demonstrate emotional extremes very easily, with no easy "default" setting, but some of that is so similar to women (e.g. you say confident but not arrogant, vulnerable but not burdensome: but see passive doormat vs, if too assertive, bitchy, and well dressed but not overly so vs being a slob or dressing for attention, women's style standards are universally higher) that it's hard not to say anything other than, well, there are a LOT of traits where moderation is desired, but the specifics can be very gender-specific. Can we really teach men to be better effectively though, without the input of women? The advice and criticism of women toward men especially in the emotional realm you seem to depict as flawed and harmful, so I'm not quite sure what you think the way forward is there.
I did not expect and was surprised to encounter an argument in favor of insults, bullying, and conflict among boys, but that's some food for thought I might come around to. The bigger picture about the importance and even necessity of probing boundaries though, that's true. More specifically in my life, I've been a substitute teacher a good number of times. Middle school is so interesting. Annoying quite often of course as well. I've heard anecdotally the male subs get more respect than the women do, though obviously I cannot test that. That's a bit of a sexist benefit, but it's definitely true that they are a bit starved for role models, and social media hasn't really helped in that regard. The flashy external stuff is popular and easily accessible, but the depth of character and deciding on your moral fiber, that usually requires some kind of extended proximity to someone you know and ideally can get advice from. Social media simply does not offer that. I should note here that despite the many ways in which school represses the natural inclinations of boys (as a sub, I do try to let things go a little bit more than most, but this can backfire pretty easily since boys are ALWAYS boundary testing at that age) it's statistically the case that far more girls find themselves lonely and socially isolated during school. Anyways, the upshot of this is that although in principle I agree that boys need a few more outlets or educational styles/opportunities catered to them, it's a really hard problem to solve. Because being loud IS annoying, if you let the kids throw things at each other they WILL and that's annoying to others too, tacitly allowing fights is a hard sell, etc.
I really liked the love vs respect paradigm, it is indeed true that while women can demand respect, and that's upheld as pretty great, men cannot demand love, and usually a lack is cast as a personal failure rather than a circumstance (or the fault of those around them being too cold). Although, it must be said, the lack of respect can also be pretty crushing to men. Still, the notion that women are inherently worth something, but a man must prove his worth, or affirmatively demonstrate they aren't evil, is pretty damaging when you get right down to it. I've seen that quite a lot, to be frank. Plus the bit about how men often feel rejected because of their personality, and this creates a major self-worth issue. And yes, the agentic expectations of men for men can frequently lead to self blame in virtually every area of life. Men need to learn to fail more gracefully. But they also need to know that failure does not actually affect inherent worth. Is that possible to consistently teach? Who knows! But loving family and religion tend to help at least a bit.
Along those lines I'd say that for some of these, I think you run a little counter to your goals in the sense that many are honestly a male-imposed standard on other males, and didn't really originate in feminism at all. Such as the teaching that men are to be judged primarily by their output, I'm sure some of it is rooted in various feminism-adjacent philosophies, but is bragging about a fast car really about the women it's supposed to attract? Not so much. Who is responsible for the weak market for strong male leads with emotional journeys? Uh, men. The primary audience and the directors and the writers, quite often enough. Etc.
I'm not quite sure where I was going with this, but those were my reactions. I was definitely moved by a few. More relevant to my life, I happen to not only be in the midst of some degree of personal struggle myself with purpose, lack of success, etc. but have a somewhat man-hating younger lesbian sister (of a more well-meaning yet nevertheless "women are better than men and that's not sexism" variety), and also a younger brother (though close in age) who decided a few months ago he wanted to be non-binary, they/them, and called by a different name too (a female one).
The latter is a culmination of a few things. He's (and I really can't think of him any other way than him, truth be told, although I'm more than willing to play the name and pronoun game) worn skirts to church just for reactions, experimented with painted nails and such, big into the indie music scene, and is now at school in Europe doing an avant garde music masters program. Over Christmas, when he made this known, it seemed to me that this was mostly rooted in masculinity having way too much baggage for him. That it was seen to be negative, the typically masculine traits were kind of bad, he felt a bit too effeminate for the label, etc. Declined to talk about what that meant sexually in any detail beyond a vague "pansexual" label (though I strongly suspect this does not in fact include men, gay or no). Feels a lot of animus towards his religious upbringing too, so that's a factor - but you know what? Sure, my mom's cried a fair amount over it. But our parents have been nothing but supportive or at least, understanding and respectful, trying to focus on the love being unconditional kind of thing. Frankly, I think this really frustrated him, as it's way easier to make villains.
I'm not sure when or if we'll ever broach the subject again soon (I do feel a bit lost about it overall) but it might be possible that some of these points could be a springboard for discussion with one or both of them. I'm pretty curious at least whether my brother would identify with some of the "feminine man" parts or not, at least.
Do you have a similar mini-pitch for the actual (affirmative) message, what the book is actually supposed to accomplish, and offer as an alternative to the two poles creating a quagmire? You wrote a lot about the problems, but what's the solution, or perhaps the definition of 'good' masculinity? Or maybe it's not that kind of book. Is then the book just about the suffering of men and validating that, or perhaps poking the holes in the current paradigm so that an affirmative new paradigm can take root (later)?
Is this the most ToaKraka comment ever?
More options
Context Copy link