HaroldWilson
2yr ago
How does that story in any way corroborate the 'groomer' narrative? Ok, there was one drag artist who took advantage of the potential for close access to children, but that could equally happen in all sorts of other scenarios (teachers, clergy, sports coaches etc.) and that is never considered grounds to smear the entire group with the tar of the 'groomer' label. And as for the library's failure to vet, seems like just ordinary laziness is the most likely explanation.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
drag is some kind of family-friendly show that should be normalized for children, and if intentional grooming isn't behind it, it sure seems to be groomer-adjacent to me.
Would you say the same about panto? Now of course there are probably individual drag artists who do inject an odd level of quasi-sexualisation into their act, but I don't think that is inherent to drag. Drag definitely can be family-friendly, because otherwise most British parents are apparently unwittingly exposing their children to 'groomer-adjacent' behaviour.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
My assumption as with every one of these controversies is that it will peter out within weeks. I mean, is there anyone still not buying Gillette razors or Nike trainers on the grounds of their respective controversial advertising campaigns? Corporate top brass are not morons, nor I suspect do they care much about any social causes, except for perhaps keeping their own taxes low and regulations light.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I mean if you have to reach back two millennia it's clear that history is not really replete with such characters. And in any case, there are plenty of democratic leaders who could well be said to fall into the same camp; Lincoln, Gladstone, Churchill, Peel and depending on what your ideological disposition is Attlee or Thatcher. I don't really subscribe to great man theory much but even if one did there are plenty of elected leaders who fit the mould.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think the part that the objections mostly focused on was his renaming by those who sought to make political capital out of it (which I'm not saying it was wrong of them to do) to 'Willie' which supposedly he was never called, which the objections suggested was to give him a stereotypically 'black' name.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Not giving someone welfare isn't the same as releasing criminals from prison (let alone when they're clearly a career criminal). Having your soldiers kill the wrong people overseas in fundamentally ill-conceived ventures is also very bad but ties into a large and complex problem with thoughtless foreign policy.
I mean, I don't think it really is. Both, after all, are government provided 'services'; and I don't think it's the perpetration of the war crimes that a hypothetical person who use as evidence of the depravity of conservatives but rather their lenient treatment. Of course when conducting a war the political leaders can't be blamed for a soldier doing something awful, but he can be blamed for pardoning that man.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Open borders (those poor immigrants), street crime (those poor incarcerated people), social promotion in school (those poor kids), crap teachers (those poor teachers [the dumbest cohort in any college - look it up]), drugs (those poor druggies need free needles), homelessness (those poor people), able-bodied people on welfare (those poor people), trannies (those poor men).... and, of course, below-replacement fertility
To go one-by-one (and to be clear I don't agree that some of these are even big problems but even if you do think that linking it to women is still extremely silly);
Open borders
The foreign born population of the US peaked in 1890 and was consistently very high for the 1860-1920 period, and per this Gallup poll men are exactly as likely as women to support decreasing immigration. https://news.gallup.com/poll/395882/immigration-views-remain-mixed-highly-partisan.aspx
street crime
Crime levels are not too easy to assess really for any pre-war period, but murder rates tend to follow crime rates closely and there are better records from past eras on the basis of which comparisons can actually be made, and on that count there is no observable relationship between female enfranchisement and murder rates; they were very high pre-war, came down around from the mid to late-30s, went back up again and now are relatively low at least compared to the pre-war era (and obviously also compared to the 80s). And once again, at least as of 2015 women were more likely to say they had a great deal of confidence in the police per Gallup, the margin being two points.
social promotion in school
What?
crap teachers
Again somewhat confused here. Is the implication here that women make bad teachers of that they support policies which lower the standard of teachers; if the latter, what are those policies?
drugs
Women are more likely to be against marijuana legalisation. Can't find a poll with crosstabs available for questions about harder drugs but I don't why there would be a dramatic change.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-support-marijuana-legalization/
homelessness
The policy which would do the most by far to alleviate homelessness is building more in urban centres; I can't find any specific polling with available gender crosstabs on specifically the question of should American zoning requirements being loosened in cities, but FWIW in Britain there was a Yougov poll asking about the classic NIMBY 'brownfield only' talking point, and on that score male and female attitudes were almost identical.
able-bodied people on welfare
On this one it does seem that there is a slight bias towards greater generosity in welfare among women - and I would say this is a good thing but nevertheless let us say that it is not for the sake of argument - but the gap isn't huge. On issues like a potential UBI the gap was 6 points in one Gallup poll, and on the semi-related issue of healthcare the gap on government provision was pretty similar. So even if you do think over-generous welfare is a serious issue the gender component is not huge; certainly not large enough to prompt shrill cries about the destructive effects of female suffrage.
below-replacement fertility
Again, which supposedly pro-natal policies are women thwarting?
100% - of these are traceable DIRECTLY to empathy and, hence, to women's suffrage
Yawn. A classic 'everyone who disagrees with me does so because they are too emotional and aren't sufficiently level headed'. Lazy and trite.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Also consider: the 1979 general election in the UK would have resulted in a Labour majority with only a male franchise. Were the UK's 70s woes due to too little Labour power?
Indeed, and even more than this women were far more likely to vote Conservative throughout the 1950s and 1960s, indeed the gap was at points a yawning 20+ point chasm.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
They tend to select the worst candidates most of the time.
I don't think is true more so than any other potential method of selection. The average democratic leader in the world right now seems pretty clearly superior to the average autocratic leader even when only comparing peer nations, if nothing else because democratic systems usually (though of course not always) seem to exclude the truly deranged; for every Ataturk you get several Mobutus, Amins and Kims.
They are beset by short term thinking
True, but autocratic leaders are hardly immune from that; see Galtieri.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think you could make posts identical to this with regard to almost any ideological leaning. So for every conservative that would cite released criminals murdering again, so could someone else cite the various cases of suicide after DWP withdrew their benefits of the depravity of their enemies, or Trump's pardoning of war criminals etc. etc.
I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favour of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.
It's not like Truth and Reconciliation was entirely one-sided though, see for instance Brian Mitchell.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Oh sure I'm not suggesting that one cannot talk about surrogacy until poverty has been abolished, my point is rather that restricting surrogacy would not actually make things better in a society where such desperation and poverty does exist, because while not a decision to be taken lightly there are clearly some women who think that going through childbirth is worth it for the reward, and while it makes me squirm too isn't hasn't actually made anything better about the situation 'women might be forced to choose between surrogacy or deprivation' since you've just made everyone choose deprivation, a deprivation apparently bad enough that they're willing to bear a child to alleviate it.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
YouGov is inferior for an obvious reason. YouGov puts their “ads” on random websites and expects people to answer the poll.
I don't think this is how they do they do their specific polls on more serious issues. In any case, they have a proven track record of doing pretty well in the only instances where their results are actually testable, in elections.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
People commissioning polls on gender identity are probably not like this though, and are mostly paying to have their biases flattered. If they don't get this result, they will take their money to a pollster that does.
If it's pro-trans people paying to have their biases flattered, then the polling companies are doing a shit job because the Pew poll especially doesn't make great reading for someone so inclined, and if anti-trans then my point is surely even further buttressed as that means that Gen Z are even more pro-trans than those polls suggest!
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Perhaps so, but if your contention is that 'some women will be so desperate for cash that they will bear a child just to earn some', the bad thing there seems to be that a woman might ever be in such a situation, not that circumstances have now changed such that they can actually follow through on such a preference.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
While it's more than a little silly, and it's clearly in one sense mainstream insofar as it's on Netflix, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone defending this outside the program-makers, actual Hoteps and miniscule minority of others. Plus, I think most people moaning about it are getting outrage-baited pretty effectively; the people who work at Netflix are not morons, and except for perhaps a few true believers among those most intimately involved with the show they doubtless knew that this would ruffle plenty of feathers
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
There a difference between not shying away from important truths and pointless, mean-spirited personal rudeness.
Calling someone an 'old barren whore' is just obnoxious shit-slinging that serves no purpose that could not be otherwise easily achieved with much less inflammatory and loaded language.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Wasn't Ted Heath a closeted homosexual?
No-one knows really. Some think he was closeted, some think just straight and unmarried, and I think I saw one or two of his cabinet colleagues in a documentary from ages ago say with some confidence that they thought he was really asexual.
missing something fundamental
They were certainly missing something, but I'm not really sure how 'fundamental' it was; no-one can enjoy all possible human experiences.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think so because whatever one might say about social pressures, in general there is a much greater degree of choice; it's not as if the avenue of being a homemaker has been closed off, and it does seem an important element of social progress that women are freer to choose something else if they so want.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Ever heard of decorum? 'I won't be wrong' is the lamest possible defence to rudeness, we lie all the time for the sake of common courtesy and that's just as it should be.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It's a bit subjective sure, but it's very obvious to me personally than this sad state of loneliness, empty and infantile thoughts and talks about making the world better, constant painful rat wheel of self reflection and psychologists to replace friends and so many more which i completely non-charitably imply from this ladies document. It all is much worse than the full family with 3+ children at 40, very trivial and non-enlightened down to earth thoughts about children, their education, clothes, food and holidays. When you simply don't have time or energy for do-gooder bullshit. In the non-woke society where societal norms are working and where you know how to do things and achieve good results just by blindly following the norms.
Eh, you can frame anything in a negative light like this is if one so chose. Just as one could unfavourably compare the much maligned 'cat lady' to the wholesome rural wife, one could do the exact opposite and unfavourably compare the put-upon housewife who lives in a drudgery of unstimulating household tasks, where for every one minute playing with her kids in the garden she must endure many many more minutes of boring domestic chores, who as Betty Friedan put it looks around her laundry, cooking and cleaning and asks herself whether this is all there is to her life, to the successful career woman who commands greater respect among male peers, is independent and stands on her own two feet and contemplates the deeper questions in life. This is also a wildly oversimplistic picture to be sure, but no more so than yours and surely equally plausible.
Indeed, no-one would make the equivalent observation for men with such certainty as you did. Would anyone say that Buchanan or Ted Heath had wasted and lonely lives because they never married? Of course not
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Right, but then age simply becomes another trait which, if one believes in the market framework, gets plugged in to determine overall desirability. So a younger man not being able to find what he perceives to be, and what without age being a factor might be, an 'equal' younger woman isn't a case of asymmetry but rather a case of age simply counting against him and in favour of any hypothetical younger woman such that the any younger woman actually 'equal' to a hypothetical man must necessarily be 'unequal' in other respects because he's already behind in the age stakes.
But again, clearly no-one actually thinks like this in real life which is why the whole 'market' and 'value' thing is such a weird nonsense.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Could you elaborate on either, not sure I really follow.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The type of guy she is wanting to “settle down” with is extremely high value
Really? Most of her criteria (which, especially with the encouragement she gives, don't even seem to be 'requirements' as such) seem to really boil down to 'be nice, be willing to be romantic and intellectually curious' which doesn't seem a particularly tall order.
This really highlights the asymmetry in dating.
I find the whole 'value' thing in dating quite grim indeed, I don't think most people think like that, but even if I were to concede it for a moment whenever people say this is sort of seems like a logical impossibility to me. Given that most people date monogamously (at least beyond a few dates) and the number of men and women roughly equal, if there is such a thing as 'value' and dating really is a sort of 'market' (which I don't actually believe but to let that go for a moment) then asymmetry is surely impossible?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
There really wasn't a great deal of variance in the final polling. Only politico was wildly out. Which isn't to say that averages won't yield better results, they will, but that the evidence of an agenda is scant indeed. Aside from the pollsters with a blatant partisan lean (Trafalgar, PPP), it's a little obscure how polling companies are attempting to propagandise with low single digit percentage differences in polling.
I was uneccesarily rude, my frustration though was that you just asserted that pollsters aren't trying to be accurate without evidence as if it was a self-evident truth.
I think those three better looking forms of non-democratic governance still seems pretty deficient in the round compared to democracy. As for monarchies, the few remaining strong monarchies seem to mostly be coasting by on oil money, and arguably NK is a monarchy in all but name, and while the PRC and some hybrid regimes seem pretty stable that stability seems pretty transient. Chinese stability especially is pretty recent, and I'm not sure Singapore as a well-placed city state has many lessons to offer other more normal nations. Hungary is I guess doing fine, but hardly better than it's more safely democratic counterparts in Czechia, Poland etc.
Obviously this is a question more complex than a short forum comment, but just on the face of it I don't there's any particular reason to believe any form of non-democratic government produces notably more competent leaders.
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