JTarrou
17hr ago
If you're going to fish in the shallow end of the gene pool, the catch may have tumors.
JTarrou
17hr ago
This. You can date someone from the other political party if you both have a different religion. You can't date someone whose politics is religion, and is opposed to yours.
JTarrou
18hr ago
My guess is that given a choice between an e-mail job in a climate controlled office and housewife, women take hte job. When given a choice between twelve-hour days hauling garbage and housewife, they take housewife. Times get hard, war, famine, economic collapse, and all feminism will wink out of existence until things improve.
JTarrou
1d ago
Possibly the white woman with the last name "Hajdini" didn't think of herself as white. I wonder what she put on her college application.
JTarrou
1d ago
If Iranian military capabilities are so feeble, why isn't the US winning the war?
The US is winning, and it's barely a war. The idea that the people missing half their government and their entire military are in some sense winning is bonkers.
Why are US strategic goals not achieved?
Neither of us knows what the actual strategic goals are, we're guessing. And sometimes wars take longer than a month or two?
Iran's already achieved their strategic goal, securing control of the straits of Hormuz.
Wat. Laying a few mines and boarding a couple merchant ships isn't "securing control", they don't "control" a single square inch of the Strait. Their navy has no ships left, nothing but speedboats. Their interdiction operations are basically the same as Somali pirates. They haven't done anything yet except spook the maritime insurance companies. This whole game is still in the first half, if not the first quarter.
Remember when Venezuela was going to chew up the Marine expeditionary units and we'd be in WW3 in the mountains of South America? And then that didn't happen?
JTarrou
1d ago
Gaza will fade soon enough. Go back in the flag Rolodex. In five years, you'll see a social media account with Ukraine and Palestinian flags and remember.....
JTarrou
1d ago
Any number of reasons, many of which will affect all your other areas of conversation too. This subject is likely to breed conflict with your partner in a relationship and in my opinion should generally be avoided. There's no reason you need to be discussing the dirty details of how the sexes differ in pursuit of the other in a context that makes gender conflict almost unavoidable.
Talking about "SMV" or whatever is what the internet is for, not your date.
JTarrou
1d ago
Sure. There's also the effect that when everyone is beautiful, no one is. Leads to a disconnect between what everyone says and what everyone knows. And there's plenty to be insecure about in the space between our perceptions there.
JTarrou
1d ago
The social norms have gone through many hundreds of "sexual revolutions" over the millenia. Give a country one good generation of relative peace and economic growth and the sexual mores go out the window. Then they fuck everything up and reinvent sexual morality from first principles and staple it onto the religion their grandparents stopped following.
All of this happened in ancient Greece and Sumeria, and no doubt much further back than all that. I'll lay dollars to donuts there's more monkey sex during times of peace and plenty.
JTarrou
1d ago
Eh, I think you'd find the same basic social patterns, just on a smaller scale. Same crab bucket, just a small one. The internet just means you can see the other four billion crabs.
As to the actual socio-sexual practices of early church christianity.....it was pretty far from what it became later, and wildly different over time. At one point, popes were having orgies with their half-sisters, at another monasteries held literal sex shows. I think you'll find that the actual state of mating at any given time was far more a product of secular trends than religious ones. These things move in cycles, religiosity and sexuality same as everything else.
JTarrou
1d ago
This is one of those things where they don't want an explanation or solution, they want to complain. Anything you say about male dating strategies from a male perspective will be taken as gender defensiveness and things will spiral from there.
What you're actually complaining about is that you can't talk to women the same way you talk to men.
JTarrou
1d ago
I would say that both men and women have a lot of parts of the "practical aspects of dating" that they'd prefer not to talk or even think about. Both sexes don't much like being held up to objective competitive standards, unless they're very confident of their position.
As to why you can't discuss looks productively with women, it's because attractiveness is core to female self image and requires immense kayfabe to avoid the crushing reality. To women, they have a social incentive to all claim all other women are beautiful, and to repeat it ad nauseum. They develop a literally insane view of female attractiveness and will be completely and totally unable to rationally discuss it under any circumstances. The male analogue is sexual success. You won't get guys to be any more honest about their sexual experience than you will get women to be honest about female sex appeal.
Men don't like being objectively and competitively ranked publicly by height, dick size, bank account, social media followers and number of sex partners. Women don't like being objectively and competitively ranked publicly by attractiveness, pleasantness, kindness and fertility.
To your larger question, all the stuff you're talking about is male-oriented models of the dating scene. These can be useful for men, but expecting women to be interested is a bit like expecting men to be into the framing model of intersectional feminism. If the model produces useful results for you in real life, who cares if women acknowledge it?
I think the recent historical record shows the Iranians can't fight any better than the Arabs. See the Iran/Iraq war. They too are a patrimonial clan-based society that can't coordinate at a national level. They also have a divided military, which has advantages for dispersion but disadvantages for coordination. They do have certain advantages in a separate ethnic identity similar to Turkey and Egypt. Iran is a more cohesive society than most arab nations, but this doesn't really translate to military capability. They've done well with unconventional guerrilla warfare using Sunni catspaws, but in a straight up shooting war they've not won shit in several hundred years.
JTarrou
1d ago
Exactly how does not being able to defend your own territory give you control over someone else's?
JTarrou
2d ago
I am tempted to ask whether, even today, life is really so bad for Iran's leadership.
In California? Not too bad. In Iran? Less so.
JTarrou
2d ago
They weren't belligerent to Iran under a different government for thirty odd years. Makes me think there's another variable.
JTarrou
2d ago
However unkind it was to Carter, it was less than he deserved. The man ruined the middle east for a generation.
JTarrou
2d ago
If Iran had settled down into being an ordinary dictatorship after the revolution, they'd probably have relations with the US no worse than e.g. Vietnam does today.
I agree, which is why it is strange
I don't know why they chose to stick with the whole "Death to America, Death to Israel" thing -- my guess would be their religious fanaticism is absolutely genuine
No doubt mostly true, but so is the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Lebanese etc. And they have more national interest at stake. The Shia are not more religiously extreme than the Sunni, much the opposite. It is Sunnis who invented and funded 99% of what we think of as "muslim terrorism". It is the Sunnis who funded and produced the anti-semitic propaganda taught to schoolchildren all over the middle east. Iran got on this "terrorism" thing late and most of the terrorists they fund are Sunnis.
So why is it easier for them to climb down than it is the Iranians? Weird, right?
JTarrou
2d ago
This is as good a take as I've seen, but it's a more detailed version of (slightly uncharitably) "the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region".
The answer to the questions in your final paragraph, as I see the current state of US policy is that Iran is going to be systematically excluded from middle-eastern affairs. This wouldn't have been my personal policy preference, but I see why they're doing what they're doing. The Sunni are the vast majority, they control most of the countries, they have most of the oil, etc. The combination of Israel, Egypt and Iran as balancing various parts of teh arab world is over for now.
I think what Trump is doing is trying to crush the "Shia Crescent", partly because the two ends of that crescent got themselves into fights they couldn't win. Whatever the outcome of the current air campaign/Hormuz crisis, I doubt Iran is going to be in any shape to be secretly funding and arming other people for a decade or so. In the meantime, what happens to their clients? If Hezbollah and Hamas can both be neutralized as military forces while their sponsor is down, the PA can be strengthened as the leadership of the Palestinians and some sort of deal becomes at least more possible than it currently is. Oct. 7th was Iran's last dice throw to stop this process, and it didn't work.
Meanwhile, various ethnic and religious minorities which have been broadly Shia-aligned/sympathetic (Yazidi, Kurds, Druze, etc.) have been systematically mass murdered, driven out or politically marginalized across the middle east. ISIS did a lot of this, AQ a fair bit etc. The result has been to drastically weaken the various groups that Iran could hypothetically use as agents against Sunni powers. The middle east is being arabized and sunnized.
JTarrou
2d ago
Read both, the second some time ago in an islamic reading list. Not bad as pop history.
JTarrou
2d ago
Then what process lead them to that belief? They didn't have it fifty years ago.
Exactly. And they're both sort of right.
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