HereAndGone
24d ago
It's not on a pedestal, it's "marriage is a partnership and the unpaid work of running a household is, indeed, work".
HereAndGone
24d ago
Not just the rich guys at Davos, though, is it? It's the support staff around them, and all the journalists reporting on it, etc. Plenty of transient custom to be worth importing some short-term workers for.
HereAndGone
24d ago
I would imagine rich men getting married (relatively) earlier, as it used to be (and maybe still is) that settling down and getting married was seen as a sign of mature stability that proved you were ready for greater responsibility and promotion up the ladder. So marrying someone of a similar background and age who knows how to navigate the work and social circles where you'll be networking your little heart out is an advantage; you can always have a discreet affair with a hot young thing from the secretarial pool later on once you're established.
HereAndGone
24d ago
They want peers who can fit in with their social and work circle and who will advance alongside them. Younger wives might not be as clued-in, so unless it's a second marriage it's not going to work as well. Her career is in the home supporting his career; making sure the dinner parties are hosted, the right people invited, remembering when to send cards and gifts for special occasions to business contacts, helping him navigate the web of relationships, turning up at the right events looking suitable on his arm, and so forth. His suits are pressed and ready for him, the home looks as it should, the exact balance of good taste and understated wealth on display to help him get promotions and move on up in the world. Everything running smoothly in the support system to his career so he can concentrate on work and not on "are the kids going to piano lessons or horse riding after school today? who is going to pick them up? mom is in the hospital, is everything okay on that end?"
HereAndGone
25d ago
Just understand you're creating an incentive for men to avoid marriage as a institution since it takes most of the control of their wealth away from them at the drop of a hat if they get married before they build their kingdom.
Some of the comments about women and marriage on here are also creating incentives for women to avoid marriage. Even relatively tame, like "The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire."
Yes, gentlemen, I hope all of you are telling the women in your lives (mothers, grandmothers, aunts, female cousins, sisters, daughters, wives) that you don't consider them equal partners, that you are the superior person in this relationship because you are the breadwinner and her little job (if she works outside the home) doesn't count. Working in the home only? Absolutely does not count for anything, she's replaceable by a coal-miner's wife because being the spouse and mother for an upper-middle class household doesn't involve any kind of extra work at all, and maybe even less work because you're rich enough to hire help. If you do decide to dump her, she deserves maybe ten bucks and a pat on the head, but certainly nothing more. Not one drop of your vast wealth (should you have vast wealth), even if that share does not, in fact, leave you penniless but you retain possession of the majority of the vast wealth.
Why, with such examples of how respected they are, why aren't women jumping at the notion of not getting an education and a career of their own and instead getting married as soon after high school as possible then producing a few kids as rapidly as possible? And if hubby gets tired of you after a while, well, you can probably find work somewhere scrubbing floors or something, automation and AI hasn't yet taken those jobs away!
Women - such ungrateful bitches, to turn down a wonderful offer like that!
I don't consider myself a misandrist, but some of you guys make it tough going, and more and more I am grateful to the Lord God Almighty for making me without the wiring to desire and need love and romance, because blow me down, I'd be fucked if I had to rely on a guy for anything from emotional validation on up.
HereAndGone
25d ago
Any controversy about, say, recordings in bathrooms is going to go through the roof if these things become commonplace. You can (maybe) grab some pervert with a phone in the women's bathroom or changing room, but someone just wearing a pair of spectacles?
HereAndGone
25d ago
I'm honestly not sure how much of this is that management thinks we're too retarded to estimate people's ages
There is that, of course, but I think this is just CYA from management for scenarios such as the one outlined by Westphalianpeace. Can't be accused of racism if you're scanning everyone's ID.
(Of course they still can, and will, accuse you of racism and management will still throw you under the bus despite any video evidence to the contrary because a law suit is the last thing they need and some bleeding-heart activist judge will rule that asking a potentially underage urban youth for ID is racism on the same level of voter suppression, don't you know minorities have little free time to get, or access to, forms of ID you bigot? But it's a tiny shred of protection for both the business and the employees.)
HereAndGone
26d ago
Yeah. The tattooed women are not (necessarily) violent themselves, they just associate with and get into relationships with the tattooed guys who are drug addicts, small-time drug dealers, petty criminals, drunks, and violent.
HereAndGone
26d ago
whatever tattoos might have once indicated about a person (besides wanting to be perceived as cool) is gone since they've been normalized
Context is exactly that. Did any of the tattoo girls look like this? If an individual looking like this were in the vicinity, would you guys have invited him to hang out, or would you have avoided him? Would your group have finger-wagged at anyone wanting to avoid this person due to the tattoos since "tattoos are now normalised" and they don't tell you anything about latent criminality?
I'm betting your group would not. Because the tattoos in that case would indeed be a signal, one that even "cool stylish fashion piece" tattoo girl would ignore at her peril. (Quite literally, as this "tattoo artist" is a convicted murderer).
HereAndGone
26d ago
some 21 year old girl from a good suburban family studying at Vassar isn't suddenly a dangerous individual because she has a 1 inch wide rose motif tattooed on her forearm.
Why do you think the forerunners of this were called "tramp stamps"? Why would a harmless (if tasteless) little tattoo on the lower back indicate "ahoy, trollop ahead"?
Because it did. Because Ms. Vassar is not going to stop at the forearm tat, next is the hair dye and septum piercing and more tattoos and then shrill critical/queer/feminist/trans theory lecturing.
HereAndGone
26d ago
Wait wait wait, I just realized, under idealized circumstances that approximately what a spouse can help achieve, if you marry well and have a good, cooperative, teammate relationship. That was probably the secret for middle class couples leveraging into higher income brackets.
And your realisation there is what annoys me about the commentary post Bezos divorce about MacKenzie getting all that money for nothing. Jeff was the guy who made the billions, she was just the wife, what did she do to deserve this money?
Well, let's see: first, she wasn't the one who blew up the marriage by hooking up with the thot next door. Second, back before Jeff was Mr. Mega-bucks, she was working a job too and contributing to the household income while he got Amazon off the ground. Third, all the support that faceh mentions that isn't explictly 'a paid job' - running the household, nurturing relationships (business as well as personal), raising the kids, being there for Jeff in the ways spouses are supposed to be there for each other. Being willing to be seen out in public with him when he was still a googly-eyed nerd before he buffed up and got work done to fix his googly eye.
But sure, none of that matters, she's just a parasite who got undeserved riches in the divorce settlement.
HereAndGone
29d ago
Oh, way way back when the first shoots of trans right activism were budding, and it was still possible to have civilised conversations around the topic, I was part of a discussion elsewhere where we were assured up, down and sideways that any qualms were just slippery slope conspiracy thinking. No boy or man would incur the stigma of dressing like a woman or claiming to really be a girl in order to get into locker rooms or bathrooms, we were told.
And then events eventuated, and turns out "I am a girl even though all I've done is grow out my hair and change my name" is plenty okay enough to be worth it. For a while, at least, seems Lia Thomas is not having the career promised after all.
HereAndGone
29d ago
he was not an American, but actually Burmese
Finally an explanation for orange man! Not orange, Oriental!
HereAndGone
29d ago
This is also part of it. I can't understand how Owens transitioned (heh!) from "well-regarded conservative commentator" to whatever the heck she's doing now.
HereAndGone
29d ago
They shouldn't even need a medical test, just hospital records of the birth of her kids. So, yeah: I think the ridiculousness of the claims undercuts the Macrons' case. Had Owens been claiming that Mme. Macron was a cougar who had sex with then-15 year old Emmanuel when he was a student in her class, then sure, go ahead with the defamation case. But "she's saying I'm really a man! who stole someone else's identity! and then married my blood-related literally young enough to be my son husband so we're in a gay incestuous underage relationship!" is so extreme, the standard of "would a reasonable person be led to believe this?" can't be proven. And Michelle Obama hasn't sued anybody for similar claims, so it makes the Macrons look even more thin-skinned and, dare I say it, Trumpian?
HereAndGone
29d ago
I mean, I find it ridiculous that a 4chan, sorry, I mean "notorious disinformation hub 4chan" meme is being taken this seriously, but then I remember the OK sign. And it seems some French political rag started it, but that's French politics. All the support for Charlie Hebdo printing cartoons of Mohammed (and I mean this quite separately from the attacks and firebombing) should also extend to stupid right-wing satire about the left-wing president's missis. I acknowledge it's not very comfortable for Mme. Macron, but her husband should be thicker-skinned because yeah, politics.
I hate to give Owens anything, but a free-speech defence may be the way to go here: 'if you are happy about re-publishing cartoons mocking a venerated figure for a couple of billion people, then le président can suck it up'. I think "this claim is so bonkers nobody can possibly take it at face value, seeing as how the woman has given birth to three kids, so this is plainly satirical and not meant as serious political commentary much less claims to be factual" is how it'll go.
Can anybody fill me in on this? I'd seen some Stupid Internet Shit about this but thought it was just edgy nonsense in the same vein about Michelle Obama really being a man. But apparently there's a mini-cottage industry in peddling tales of goings-on in the French president's private and political life?
Attacks on Brigitte Macron’s appearance and falsehoods about her gender have circulated for years, though Owens amplified them considerably in the US. Other prominent women in politics, including Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, have faced these kinds of “secretly transgender” social media campaigns, the Wilson Center noted in a 2021 report on the “deeply misogynistic” trend. “These narratives tap into the trope of the duplicitous woman, implying that not only are transgender individuals inherently deceptive, but that this deception is responsible for the power and influence that these women hold,” the report said.
The Macrons have previously filed legal claims against two women in France over their theory that Brigitte Macron is a biological male. They were initially found guilty of libel, though that was then overturned, which Brigitte Macron has now appealed.
I don't know who Candace Owens is, and although I've seen her name mentioned online, I deliberately refrained from finding out more because I don't have the time or inclination to go down those rabbit holes. But now the Stupid Edgy Internet Shit is mainstream news, so I am reluctantly requesting information. Can Owens get away with the "clown nose on, clown nose off" Jon Stewart defence of "hey, I'm a comedian and an entertainer, this was just satirical comedy and not meant to be current affairs reporting"? Will we see President and Madame Macron turning up in a Delaware court? How do you tactfully question a witness as to "Yes, you started a romantic affair with your now-husband when you were his teacher and he was in the same class as one of your kids, and his parents tried to separate you so a bit of yikes there, but you are not related to him and so the charges of incest are wrong, as are claims that you were born a male"?
I find it mind-boggling that this nonsense is apparently being taken so seriously, but I guess Emmanuel finally snapped after all the jokes about his height and his 'hot for teacher' marriage. Also it seems that Owens didn't originate these claims, as they started in France, so can that be a defence too?
Prominent US conservative commentator Candace Owens vehemently attacked the first lady in a now-deleted YouTube video posted on March 11, propagating a false claim that first exploded in France just weeks before the 2022 presidential election.
Brigitte Macron is falsely accused of being born as a man called Jean-Michel Trogneux, her maiden surname, with that name going viral as a hashtag.
...Originally shared in the United States on sites like notorious disinformation hub 4chan, the claim snowballed when figures "with very large audiences gave it visibility", doctoral researcher Sophie Chauvet, specialising in audience metrics, told AFP.
In her video, conservative commentator Owens cites a "thorough investigation" by so-called independent journalist Natacha Rey, published in the French newsletter Faits et Documents in 2021.
Founded in 1996 by far-right French figure Emmanuel Ratier and now headed by Xavier Poussard, Faits et Documents regularly promotes stories targeting the first lady, a journalist at the French weekly L'Obs, Emmanuelle Anizon, told AFP.
"But what is new is that Xavier Poussard started translating his articles at the end of 2023," Anizon said, adding that he claims to have sent an English version to those close to former US president Donald Trump.
Anizon, who spoke to Poussard and his associate Aurelien Poirson who advised on the translation, explained that it was no accident that the US far right had taken up the false claim ahead of the November US elections.
HereAndGone
30d ago
I wonder. The way it's reported sounds less "Cousin Miguel knows somebody whose sister-in-law is a clerk in a government office, maybe she can look this up" and more "somebody high up enough to get access to the information straight away". But it's all so nebulous it's not even sure that the alleged family exist, or the guy, or that this story is more than someone trying to use outrage bait to get a juicy payoff from selling interviews to the media (or I suppose using the media to publicise their GoFundMe to 'bring Grandpa home').
Extending the right of civil marriage as a contract to the gays was something that I would have been tepid about and not really minded (until the idiots running the pro-same sex marriage campaign in my country couldn't successfully hide their contempt for normal mores and enraged me to red-hot "I'm voting no in the referendum, I know we're gonna lose but to hell with it, I am not going along with this crap"), but it was ridiculous to say that changing the definition of marriage would not have any effects whatsoever. If we changed the age of consent to be six, I don't think anyone would get away with "now it's legal to fuck six year olds but this will have no effect on wider society whatsoever".
Same way that the number of abortions has gone up in my country once it was legalised. Gosh, you don't say? Making something legal means more of it happens? Who could possibly have foreseen that? Oh, and this is despite the rollout of free contraception and nope, it's not all "pregnant by incestuous rape and I will die unless I get an abortion because I'm only ten" cases:
The number of women having abortions in Ireland rose significantly last year to 10,852, the highest on record since the law changed.
This compares to 8,156 terminations of pregnancy carried out here in 2022 under the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018.
The majority, 10,711, were early medical abortions, where a woman takes two types of tablet prescribed by a GP up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Another 108 terminations were due to a diagnosed fatal foetal abnormality where there was a condition likely to lead to death of the foetus.
A further 24 pregnancies were terminated due to risk to the life or health of the mother, while another nine involved an emergency intervention.
...Asked to comment on the overall number of terminations for last year, Dr Shirley McQuade, medical director of the Well Woman Centre, said she was surprised at the high number.
She said while the population has increased and would account for some of the rise, there are likely to be other factors also behind the increase.
She pointed out that free contraception is now available to women aged 17 to 35 years of age, which should make it easier to control fertility.
“The options are out there for women to use. Obviously there is a failure rate in contraception, but it is quite low,” she said.
“There may be women who are on a form of contraception that is not suiting them or they are forgetting to take it. There are women who avoid taking any form of contraception, but are not joining the dots.
“If they are sexually active and not using contraception, the likelihood is they are going to get pregnant.”
So if we add up all the "thousands of women will die unless we get legal abortion!" cases by these figures, that's a whole 108 +24 +9 = 141. Out of 10,852 that comes to... 1.3%. Well I'm so glad compassion and trusting the medical experts won the abortion battle now.
At this stage I'm singing the same old song, but here goes: clears throat But I was told and assured by the government bringing this in that abortion would be limited and would only be for very severe cases of medical necessity! There would be no abortions because "whoops, I got laid and now there's a bun in the oven and I'm not ready for that"! (No, I did not believe any of that so the latest results don't surprise me).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Reading the linked Guardian story, here's a line about the Morning Call paper which broke the story and was getting fed all the heart-rending details from the family:
They noted the purported family ceased responding to their requests for clarification on Monday, and they couldn’t verify details in Guatemala.
Well, I'm sure the heart-broken family will get right back to them any day now in order to clarify what is going on!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
There is definitely not a slope, and were there a slope, it definitely would not be slippery.
I'm a social conservative, and the new orthodox faith of the One, True, Catholic Church of Trans Rights is not convincing me to shift on that. All the former gay rights activism that successfully sold the line "if you're not gay, this will have no effect on your life" to the mainstream and the trans activism that piggy-backed on this ("why are those bigoted conservatives so obsessed with bathrooms? no trans person has ever said anything about bathrooms, it's all them!") couldn't maintain the facade. Never mind "bake the cake, bigot", we're now in "um, aren't pregnant people women?/die, heretic! leper outcast unclean!" territory.
Yes, you too can be barred for life from the party you co-founded because you questioned a previous banning for life for not being 200% onboard with "we need this inclusive terminology so trans men and non-binary persons won't feel all oppressed and persecuted when turning up for their pre-natal appointments. Sure, maybe they're only 1% if that of people who turn up to maternity hospitals, but won't the 99% who are women be just overjoyed to make this teeny little change in being referred to not as a mother but a 'pregnant person'? And if they're not thrilled, too bad for them. They better know to keep their mouths shut, the transphobic bigots!"
Believe it or not, I want to be charitable to people who are unhappy with their bodies. I don't want to kick up a fuss about the changes. I'm not even that outraged about bathrooms. But when we're getting to the point of witch-burning someone for just being in the general vicinity of a witch, tell me how this makes society better for us all?
HereAndGone
1mo ago
The first one is obviously a scammer, lots of these come out of the woodwork to offer help (at a hefty price) to families whenever there's something newsworthy like a tragedy reported.
The grandpa's brother had a contact in the Chilean government? This sounds less like "simple leatherworker" and more like maybe something is going on that is not being reported. If any of this is true and not a story being peddled around by "Nataly" to make bank off the outrage about deportations. Sometimes people do make up fake stories to sell, shocking I know!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
If the author mentions fine details that would refer to some real life incident that is not actually supposed to be in the story, there's a good chance the author is trying to lecture about the real life incident.
But I was assured that "the knife-ears took er jerbs!" scene was not at all meant to be a comment on Trump and immigration! 😁
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I wonder if it's because, Walz' attempts at "they're weird" to the contrary, Vance doesn't fit the "rich evil and dumb" or "poor evil and dumb" story about Republicans. He wasn't born rich, he made his way as an outsider into success, and despite anything else they can throw at him, he's smart (not a genius, but not Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel either).
He's supposed to be either the dumb redneck MAGA voter who is a failure by the Elite Coast metrics and so can safely be dismissed, or made his way out of dumb redneck hillbilly hell, went to the Big City and got a college education, and then adopted the classical liberal to mildly progressive values and so ended up in the Democratic Party. That was supposed to be his trajectory after "Hillbilly Elegy" where he did not glamorise the rural culture he was raised in: religiose, working-class, poor and mired in drug addiction and mediocrity (Alexander Turok should love that). That he did not do this, I think, is what is seen as a betrayal. That's why he has to be excoriated.
You know, it took a lot to get me to this position, but here I am: yes, Israel wants the Gaza problem solved by having them disappear. Deported out of the country if possible, but dead works too.
Settlers running amok and nobody stopping them, with the Israeli authorities (police on up) just winking at burning land belonging to Palestinians, shooting at them, and moving in and taking over land. Too many "oopsies, we didn't mean to hit that target" events. "Oh yeah sure we'll let in the aid convoy - oh no, we can't, security issues y'see".
Israel wants the entire territory to belong to them, and they don't see the Palestinians as any kind of citizens to remain there. "It's all Hamas propaganda, nobody is starving, if only they turned on Hamas then there would be peace". If they turned on Hamas, then they would just be bulldozed into the ground even quicker.
I'm not supporting Hamas. I think they're terrible. But I also understand why a lot of Palestinians will support them, in the face of "we're shooting people queuing for water, we're blocking aid so babies are starving to death, and if anyone says anything then we cry anti-Semitism and invoke the Holocaust".
I don't believe in Israeli good intentions anymore, if ever I did.
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