Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I grew up in a relatively conservative community. There was one boy who, at age 4-ish, liked to dress in girl's outfits when we played dress-up games. He also liked some "girl's" toys, e.g. Polly Pocket. He was also fearful of competitive sports and tended to make friends better with girls rather than boys (I was an exception).
As often happens, he's just gay. He often finds it easier to identify with women and empathise with them, perhaps because he has more of a lady-brain (who knows?). People in this relatively conservative community generally ignored it, reasoning "He'll grow out of it," and they were right, since he is (99%) a typical adult guy these days.
The same thing happened with a girl in my neighbourhood, who just turned out to have a very active imagination as a child. She's now married to a man, with kids etc. She had a very religious family, who treated it as a game (like a child who decides that they are a dinosaur) and within a year she had forgotten even that she used to insist that she was a boy.
Kids are weird. Sometimes, it's because there is something deeply different about them. It's hard to know why, so it's best to enjoy the ride (within sensible boundaries e.g. keeping them from sexual experimentation) and offer them love throughout the process.
Having lived in quite a few European countries and knowing British history in some detail, I would put it this way: the UK had a period of great comparative success across a huge range of fields (prior to about 1945) where European countries they didn't outperform economically (France, Germany) were outperformed militarily/diplomatically, and the UK developed a fairly "laissez faire" type of imperialism that had some definite advantages over Belgian rapaciousness, French assimilationism etc.
The UK had a period of relative decline in 1945-1979. This was only relative (this was a period of mostly solid growth) and with some exceptions (UK unemployment rates were low in this period, even compared to e.g. the US).
The UK had a concerted and successful effort to combat relative decline from about 1979-2007. This took different forms, e.g. Thatcher had great confidence in Victorian institutions, practices, and values; Blair had a huge love of America (especially Clintonian America) public service modernisation, and wanted the UK to lead the EU into a modernist, progressive, American-style supra-state; Major was somewhere in between, with a strange sort of quiet iconoclasm in favour of "ordinary people" that ranged from the clever (getting rid of stupid regulations on everything from employment agencies to service stations) to the absurd (the "Cones Hotline").
For various reasons, I mostly blame Brown and subsequent UK politicians, and of course the UK voters to whom they pander. For example, the UK has a great edge in financial and business services. UK business services are one area where the UK still does great, partly due to language, partly due to regulation, and partly due to agglomeration in London/South-East England. What do UK politicians and voters love? MANUFACTURING. Steel. SHIPBUILDING. It's like a tall, scrawny but fast kid wanting to play rugby and set weightlifting records rather than basketball and netball - admirable, but stupid. So the UK overregulates and taxes its financial sector (as well as the occasional kick to its oil sector) and then wonders why its economy underperforms.
Similarly, the UK voters hate paying taxes at the levels of European countries. So they have the opportunity to e.g. save more of their own money for retirement, taking advantage of the huge long-term gains that private investment can make relative to pay-as-you-go state pensions. But they also want state pensions at European levels (no Boomer left behind) so politicians have introduced an unsustainable pensions uprating scheme that has meant that, despite significant spending cuts in some areas (welfare, education etc.) and despite tax rises to about peacetime highs, the UK public finances are still shit. This is not how a serious country deals with an ageing population.
And there's the UK national religion, the NHS, a healthcare system designed to save the UK Labour party from the wrath of doctors in the 1950 election, which voters think (a) should be improved, (b) should not be changed, and (c) should not cost them personally any more in taxes or fees. I suppose there are some religions with more absurd origins and principles...
Scotland is the beak of the UK ostrich: deepest into the sand it has buried itself.
I have lived in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, and other places. These countries all have their own chronic problems and a similar lack of ambition in dealing with them. For me, it just stands out more in the UK (and more recently in the US) because the Limeys used to have some leaders and an electorate who were serious about tough changes. For all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was about the closest the West has come to a Lee Kuan Yew figure: someone who really thought, "If a policy is too popular, then we are being too careful."
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
My impression is that the Catholic Church is going through a similar pattern to Mainline Protestant churches:
(1) Declining membership in the West (immigrants aside) but still strong in the Third World.
(2) A hesistant pivot to liberalism, which alienates the conservatives in the West and alienates almost all of the Third World, without actually increasing membership in the West. More radical churches pick up the Western conservatives$ and gain strength in the Third World.
(3) Doubling down by pivoting more (but still hesitantly) towards liberalism.
Catholicism seems to be less far down this road that Mainline Protestantism, but it seems stuck. And as the experience of Evangelical Protestants has shown in the past 20 years (AFAIK) conservative Christianity is struggling in the West too, just in different ways (higher apostacy among the young).
$ This does not seem to be happening with the conservative Catholics, but from those I know, they are disengaged and fed up, and this may result in greater apostacy among their children.
Is that accurate? It would confirm my expectations of Pope Francis's papacy, but I have limited info on the Catholic Church these days, so I am worried about confirmation bias.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?
It's classic anxiety behaviour. When one is worried about X, but doing something about X seems hopeless, then worry about Y instead, provided Y seems X-ish and it seems like progress on Y is more optimistic. Politicians are under pressure to do something about women being murdered. This is something, and it's "kinda about" women being murdered, or at least violence against women, or at least implied violence against women, or at least violent words about women, or at least nasty words about women. By the supposed transitivity of "aboutness", that's about women being murdered.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
not have any particular beef with others
To be fair, the Hindus don't have a beef with anyone else, or even others, or even alone.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode
You don't think many teenage girls rank male classmates?
I remember ranking boys in terms of cuteness (albeit ordinally rather than quantitatively) being a repeat conversation among some girls from age about 11 onwards. How else can you work out which boys you can date without getting bullied?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I knew someone who embodied this confusion, from a very generic middle-class Western background. She was very excited to do "Slut Walks", but she was worried that they were being appropriated by "actually slutty women" i.e. strippers, prostitutes, pornstars etc., and she's opposed to the sex industry in all its forms. Her ethos was basically that sex workers should never be judged negatively (at least if women or gay) but also that their industries should be abolished.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
giving myself any sort of self actualizing goal and getting busy is the best and most immediate cure.
And a lot cheaper than going to therapy. Even classically "useless" male coping mechanisms like chopping wood or fantasy football are cheaper, while potentially disproving negative thoughts like "I can never do anything right!" that people often experience when depressed.
Today, I passed a forest path that I cleared for a summer job as a teenager, when I was very depressed and almost crippled with social anxieties. Working on that path wasn't the whole story of how I got better, but it was one of the early moves in the right direction. Of course my work was sporadic, ill-organised, slow, and so on, but it was something where I made progress every day, received some positive feedback, and achieved something that looked impressive at the end.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I came to similar conclusions based on reading/hearing the thoughts of Mark Noble, a neuroscientist:
https://feelinggood.com/2019/11/18/167-feeling-great-professor-mark-noble-on-team-cbt-and-the-brain/
Basically, a good rule-of-thumb in neuroscience is "what fires together, wires together." So classic talk therapy (going over thoughts again and again with an interested but passive, unjudgemental or supportive therapist) might actually strengthen neural pathways that lead to depressed, anxious, angry, or otherwise undesired mental states.
This also explains why, if possible, just ignoring thoughts like "I'm useless" or "This is going to end terribly" or "It's SO unfair!" can be remarkably effective at avoiding the concomitant emotional problems; I think there was some research on this recently. It also explains why men's "just don't dwell on it" coping strategies are associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts than among women, despite the ideology that "repression" is a bad thing. Men have more successful suicide attempts, but this can be explained by higher levels of aggression. It also explains research suggesting that the behavioural activation methods in CBT are the most effective, since these are focused on rapidly removing negative thoughts/habits (e.g. by falsifying your hypothesis that holding a house spider will kill you with its venom or that your old friends will hate you if you get back in touch with them).
Mark Noble argues that approaches like David Burns's TEAM therapy, which aim at rapid recovery, will be more successful, partly because they minimise the amount of time spent on therapy or brooding outside of therapy. Noble also thinks there also reasons to think that each element of TEAM (Testing emotions/therapist performance before and after sessions, Empathising with the client, Agenda-setting to deal with client resistance to change, Methods for rapid and client-calibrated recovery) has a neuroscientific basis for effectiveness.
However, even if TEAM doesn't have these properties, I think that the idea of gradual change and the elevation of emotional expression have quite possibly damaged millions of people's mental health.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
darkly hint towards the murder being motivated by transphobia without explicitly saying so
In the view of the Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents (admittedly not the most prominent outlet in the US, nor Pittsburgh, nor perhaps the Pittsburgh lesbian community) her death is now part of the 2024 "campaign of terror":
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Trump and the Republicans have played things like "post-birth abortions" very well so far. If they're smart, they'll apply the same mix of hyperbole and accuracy for the "abolition of motherhood". The Republicans may struggle with young women, but married women with children have been fertile ground (excuse the metaphor) for them and other conservative parties in the past.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
To put the SDP in some perspective for outsiders to UK politics: they are the descendents of a centre-left breakaway from the Labour party in 1981, who largely dissolved in the late 1980s. Somehow, they managed to survive through a nuclear winter and have remerged a little as a party for people who like Brexit/social conservativism, but who are more economically centrist/left wing than the Tories or Reform. They are one of the tardigrade parties in the UK: no matter the hostility of the environment and their tiny size within it, they seem to just survive.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
On "post-birth abortion" (more accurately, non-resucitation of neonatal infants) the Republicans are right that this occurs, though it is a matter of physician's judgement rather than something the mother can just demand:
In these cases, where there is little or no prospect of an infant surviving after birth, families might opt for perinatal palliative care, or comfort care — prioritizing comfort while allowing an infant to die naturally without exercising full resuscitation efforts.
They conclude that, fortunately, there is no actual post-birth abortion... because they DEFINE abortion to exclude such cases. That's like saying there are no gun owners who commit school shootings, because you DEFINE "gun owner" to exclude those who use guns for illegal purposes that would lead to their gun licence being revoked.
For moderates on abortion who don't even like the existence of a slippery slope towards infanticide (e.g. as "little prospect" becomes extended, then a judgement for the mother etc.) this sort of thing is cold comfort and an easy point of attack for Republicans against Democrats.
More generally, to see how this is a needlessly difficult issue for Democrats, see how the (generally sympathetic to them) FactCheck puts it:
Claim: Democrats “introduced legislation that allowed abortion on demand ... up to the moment of birth."
Claimed by: Lindsey Graham
Fact check by FactCheck.org: Spins the Facts
Same with AP news:
Claim: Forty-nine Democratic senators voted that it should be lawful to kill a full-term baby the moment before birth while it is still inside its mother.
Claimed by: social media users
Fact check by AP News: Misleading.
These editorial spins are fact-checker answers for when they can't say that something is false, but they would love to do so.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad.
As the TERF controversies showed, agreeing with right wing extremists on Current Year issues is enough to be judged guilty by association. For example, Julie Bindel is far to the left of almost all of her critics, on most issues. Controversies-of-the-day create weird alliances: think of Christopher Hitchens and neoconservatives on the Iraq War.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
But to make it worse, DC is filled with people who have open contempt for the residents of "flyover states". They devote all of their energy to social signalling and fail at their actual jobs.
This is an important point. When you're part of an elite that has captured the institutions, then your rise can be very disconnected from your performance. Ursula von der Leyen was caught plagiarising her PhD, she was a failure as German Ministry of Defence, and thus became President of Europe.
Yet she was born to parents in the first Brussels elites, attended the right educational establishments, and she was skilled at being an ostensibly conservative politician who did/said what the German centre-left wanted.
She now fails upward in things like the EU's covid vaccination programme (where she apparently forgot that Northern Ireland and Ireland share an open border when she was threatening the UK with sanctions for having a more successful programme and thus embarassing the EU - she dropped the threats when someone smarter in Brussels told her that they'd just been negotiating for most of the past 5 years to keep that border open) and a future leadership position at the UN or IMF is something she is "earning."
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Anecdotal: I have a look recently at women playing Super Seducer. I thought it might be an insight into how at least some of them think of seduction and dating. Plus, Richard La Ruina operates in an interesting borderland of acceptability, where e.g. the woker girl gamers feel like they should demonise him but keep on saying "Huh, that's actually good advice."
Where they tend to fail is that their basic plan for a man to pursue a woman is to try and make them his friend. This makes sense: for straight women and even lesbians, befriending is their main interaction with other women. Many women, even seemingly "awkward" women, are actually very good at this task. They know how to flatter women, find common interests, make women feel comfortable around them etc.
While these skills can obviously be useful for dating women, it's not surprising that a lot of these women's advice are textbook paths to the friendzone, because that's what they're designed to do.
Also, even if a woman thinks "How do guys seduce me?" it's hard to answer that honestly, because a woman being seduced is potentially a status loss, so it's necessary to say things like "He has to know me for months and be kind and just treat me like any other friend" etc., because something like "His best strategy is to be confident, asserive, push things forward, one step ahead, and stand out from all my other guy friends in some way" suggests that she's prone to manipulation, and nobody likes to admit that. Men too: I have seem men been obviously lured into a relationship and hate to admit that the woman was actually the one coordinating the interaction. Never me, of course...
Income tax rates have never been lower.
This is not true. It's true that they have been higher.
Obamacare was effectively a subsidy for large health insurance corporations—far from single payer that progressives really want.
Obamacare is one of your examples of conservatives winning, because it was a subsidy?
Unrestricted immigration continues to depress low-skilled wages.
Mass immigration is an example of conservatives winning?
You also deftly avoided social issues, where - apart from recently on abortion - conservatives have had a long, long rout. They can't even vote to get rid of gay marriage any more, while DEI is the official ideology of one institution after another. For all the culture war's early focus on higher education, you have to provide a DEI statement to even apply to teach at most US colleges.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
That was the first time I saw election memes and they were devastating against Kerry. I can't find it now, but it was a series of pictures of Bush/his wife looking presidential and Kerry/his wife looking silly (e.g. breaking the law of politics that you never, under any circumstances, wear a hat) that had me laughing, even as someone whose politics at the time largely consisted of "I hate neocons."
"Communist" is already a win for the left. She was a Stalinist, joining the pro-Stalin CPUSA in 1936, around the time when many more humanitarian communists left. She stuck with the Soviet Union through the show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Iron Curtain, the 1956 revelations about Stalinism, and the Invasion of Hungary.
And for all her support for the Soviet Union, she had the gall to be piqued when the ACLU didn't want a literal Stalinist in their organisation in 1940, whose organisation was defending the use of the Smith Act against Trotskyists, suggesting that the "Rebel Girl" had a high tolerance for hypocrisy as well as bloodshed.
Just responding to the manufacturing point, I don't think British voters particularly fetishise heavy industry so much as they feel that the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again.
That's part of it, I agree. The LKY solution would be to build lots of houses where there are jobs, so more people can escape dependency and joblessness. If people complain about losing the green belt or excess urban density or the loss of the beautiful Essex countryside, then you're doing it right.
Also, in my experience Brits consistently conflate manufacturing output with manufacturing employment. Thatcher's policies led to a boom in UK manufacturing, just not UK manufacturing employment: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/22/1413987501531_wps_2_SPT_Ben1_jpg.jpg
So if you ask a Brit if they think that the UK produces more today than in the days of coal mining, Ravenscraig etc., they'll think, "Certainly not." This is partly because they conflate manufacturing with "a man's work" i.e. something dirty and smelly you do with your hands (but in public).
Of course, this sort of sentiment is almost universal, but for a while, the UK had the leaders and the electorate to plough forward with tough, realistic decisions.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
Can you give 5 examples, please?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I will take that as a compliment. Sachs, unlike me, is, uh, accomplished. He is not talking his ass off like all of us here, even if he's talking his ass off. At least, I think.
Unlike all of us here, he is also a relentless China shill, and concomitantly reflexively gives the official Chinese line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs#China_2
Humanity 1. The NGO is "SOS Humanity", a German organisation.
The new Italian government is arguing that the host countries of these organisations should agree to take in some of the migrants who are being picked up at sea.
SOS Humanity argues that any migrant whose ship capsizes etc. and gets rescued by them has a right, under the law of the sea, to be taken to the nearest safe port. The incentive effects that this creates are obviously monstrous: you can go anywhere, provided you can do so unsafely. NGOs will make every effort to help you get into the country you want, provided that your boat sinks and the lives of e.g. your children are threatened...
It's like offering a child toys and candy every time they drink bleach.
The Italian government must be very careful, because the last interior minister who tried to reduce mass migration over the Mediterranean is now being prosecuted for "kidnapping" migrants and could face 15 years in jail for his actions as minister...
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
JFK assassination: the proof is that the files are still sealed 100 years later
I have really lost track of time since the covid pandemic.
Given the importance of the Midwest in US politics, doing anything to suggest German = bad is not a good idea. Plus, AFAIK, most people these days have no idea who the Stazi were ("Some sorta Nazis?").
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