Don’t forget Georgia Representative Hank Johnson, who famously worried that the island of Guam might tip over and capsize.
Ah, that makes more sense. I initially thought you meant he was an affirmative action appointment and was therefore the most persuasive example against affirmative action because he sucked. I didn’t pick up on the fact that you were establishing a dilemma.
Edit: On rereading, I think if you didn’t intend the message to be “Clarence Thomas sucks,” you rather muddied the waters by mentioning his name immediately after saying, “Nowhere can a black person rise farther with less talent than by claiming to be a Republican.”
A nice write up, but what’s with the dig against Clarence Thomas at the end? What’s so bad about him?
To add to this, until Griswold v. Connecticut was decided in 1965, many states had laws prohibiting married couples from using contraceptives, so great was their governments’ interest in promoting children and preventing vice.
I would consider killing uninvolved civilians to be a war crime, and I believe that triple tapping a convoy is pretty deliberate. As for starvation, I defer to the humanitarian organizations and foreign governments that have been involved in relief efforts, who almost unanimously agree that Gaza is on the brink of famine.
Edit: Oh, and as to the last point, let’s not forget that at least one member of the Israeli government has gone on record that it is “just and moral” to starve the entire Gazan population until Israeli demands are met.
War crimes, yes. Deliberately attacking humanitarian relief convoys, yes. Cruelly doing their utmost to starve the Gazans to death while still maintaining some level of deniability, also unfortunately yes. But given the relatively low fatality rate, can you really say that the actual fighting has been all that brutal?
I’m no fan of Israel’s behavior, but let’s be clear about what heinous actions they are and aren’t committing.
When you say collapse, what exactly do you have in mind? Are we talking about a triage situation or something more long-term damaging? If it’s the former, I would consider the situation deeply unfortunate, but it’s also something that would resolve itself in relatively short order.
Take the issue of ventilator shortages, which I recall being a real problem in some areas in early to mid-2020. It’s horrifying if you’re a Covid patient who needs a ventilator but who can’t get one, but I wouldn’t consider the deaths that resulted from such shortages to constitute collapse of the hospital infrastructure.
Also, on the topic of lockdowns, it seems to me that we went about it in exactly the wrong way. Assuming we were going to do some kind of lockdown regardless, it seems to me that we should have forced the at-risk portions of the population to isolate, directed the fountain of free federal money to “reward” those who stayed on the job, let the disease rip through the healthy population, then rescinded all lockdown measures once the number of cases was low enough that there was little risk of overwhelming the hospital systems. You’re still running rough-shod over some people’s freedoms, but that seemed to be inevitable by March of 2020, and at least this plan seems like it would have been less destructive and more effective.
I’m not even sure it’s entirely a reproductive issue instead of a general fitness one. It seemed like every time I heard about some perfectly normal, healthy young person dying of Covid, it turned out he or she weighed 300 lbs.
I can’t speak to most people, but I remember how bad it was. It was so bad that New York City had to bring in emergency 1,000-bed hospital ships in order to handle the overflow of cases. Of course, those ships sat virtually empty and unused, and their large crew of medical workers basically got to enjoy a free holiday, but still, they had to bring in ships! It was so bad, Covid-positive patients had to be rehoused away from the hospitals and into empty schools nursing homes, for some reason. It was so bad that nurses were so exhausted, they barely had the time and energy to make TikTok videos to help keep people’s spirits up as they were imprisoned in their homes. It was bad.
A lot of COVID-denier types were able to miss just how close we were to total collapse because everyone was locked up at home but this could be really, really bad.
I don’t think the Covid-deniers did miss that; it’s everyone else who failed to see the issue. Opposition to lockdowns was the single thing that united all the various types of skeptics.
While I won’t deny that, I’d rather put it that it’s an easy thing for anyone who saw the competency with which almost all Western governments handled Covid to say. After living through 2020–2022, do you really trust the CDC, the WHO, the federal and most state governments, the major medical journals, or any other group to get this one right?
At this point, the medical establishment and government don’t (or at least, I really, really hope they don’t) have enough credibility left to enforce anti-pandemic measures. Even if avian flu does become a human pandemic and is widely acknowledged as such, it’s probably just going to have to rip through the population like any other transmittable disease. Those who get sick, get sick; those who die, die; and those who survive eventually reach herd immunity.
What changed a week or so ago? Are you talking about the interest rate drop?
Not thinking to grab your social security card and birth certificate I fully understand, but how would you possibly leave behind your driver’s license? Do you not keep it in your wallet, phone case, car, or some other similar place? I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I left home without my driver’s license, since it never leaves my wallet.
At least one such troll keeps a list.
Isn’t permanent demographic change already inevitable? In 1950, the United States was 89.5% white, 10% black, and 0.5% other. By 2000, the U.S. was 75.1% white, 12.3% black, and 12.6% other. As of 2020, the United States is 61.6% white (57.8% non-Hispanic white), 12.4% black, and 26% other. You can see stats on other years here. Today, every age group under 25 is now less than 50% non-Hispanic white. There’s no reversing that.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious. Little Caesar’s is by far the most revolting pizza I’ve ever tasted. Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Domino’s, Sbarro—hell, even Great Value frozen pizzas—are all far superior, even though I wouldn’t rank of them as great pizza either.
No, it's not coercion.
I was responding to the “make him/me” in your previous comment. I think I sort of get where you’re coming from now, though it still seems like a much more power-focused dynamic than I’d have expected.
He'll go along with it for a while
Doesn’t this contradict your initial post (“Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha”) and even the end of this last post (“The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top”)? Or was I misreading you? I thought you were using “alpha” and “beta” as synonyms for “top/active” and “bottom/passive.”
Incidentally, I’d like to second doglatine. This isn’t a subject I would have guessed I’d have found interesting, but it turns out that I do. Kudos.
So in the gay dating world, would it be fair to say that there is an element of—is coercion the right word?—when it comes to sex? Like in the ideal world, you’d wrestle and then the loser would have to pleasure the winner, rather like the loser when two boys wrestle might be forced to eat grass? If so, that is… rather different than what I would have expected. It sounds rather like the dynamic feminists imagine when they say that all sex/rape is just about power.
Also, though I’ve never considered it before, I think I see the cause of the problem right away. Presumably most gay men are gay because they enjoy being the receptive partner, leaving a dearth of men who enjoy being the active partner (possibly more of whom are bi than gay?). Is that a fair assessment?
BTW deaconess is not really a monastic thing
That depends entirely on your tradition. Lutheran deaconesses traditionally (and in the case of at least one deaconess house, still do) live together in community, wear habits, take the honorific “Sister,” and vow to remain celibate for as long as they remain deaconesses.
I found this an interesting read, but I’m a little puzzled about the alpha vs. beta distinction you’re making. At the start, you make it sound like the alpha is just the bigger, taller, and more muscular partner, and the beta is the shorter and weaker one, but later on, you seem to be hinting at a psychological dimension as well. In day to day life, that would make sense. I’ve certainly known men who are physically not all that impressive but who exude confidence and authority, just as I’ve known men who could beat most people to a bloody pulp but who are nevertheless obvious betas (and there are plenty of men who are dominant in one social group and passive in another). Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength? And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good? If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)
Also, with regard to the birth order effect,
The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them.
My understanding is that the effect holds true even when the younger brothers are raised apart (when, e.g., the youngest was adopted), which would point to a biological cause in utero, rather than anything from socialization.
It’s also hard not to appreciate St. Jerome, who is most famous for his translation of the Bible into Latin, but who was also, as one scholar put it, an “irascible, morbidly sensitive old curmudgeon,” who made frequent acerbic comments to and about his fellow clergymen, including Sts. Ambrose and Augustine.
A quick search pulled up this article, which includes some other gems:
When Jerome experienced his own sort of exile after the death of his patron Damasus, he venomously hissed at the “Senate of Pharisees” for having driven him from his beloved Rome.
He was not the continent Augustine who never hinted at struggles with concupiscence after his famous moment in the garden that brought him the chastity for which he had been praying. In his mid-seventies, Jerome tells us that it was only when his body was broken by age that he was freed from his disordered desires.
He was not the disciplined Antony of Egypt who spent 20 years alone pursuing a life of renunciation and who perfected the art of self-mastery. He completely failed at his own desert experiment, even though he had dragged his sizeable library across the Mediterranean to keep him company (what a spectacle that must have been!). Years later, he said of his time there that “when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome. I used to sit alone because I was filled with bitterness.”
Honestly, he sounds a lot like a Mottizen.
Unpredictability. Subconsciously, we’re thinking, “Something is off about this person. Is he about to have an inappropriate (and perhaps even violent) reaction to something I say or do?” It’s why the revulsion to mentally retarded children isn’t nearly as extreme. The fact that most mentally retarded people are unusually ugly is probably another, albeit minor, factor, as most people are naturally drawn to beauty and repulsed by ugliness.
Just thinking aloud here… This site is a Reddit clone of sorts. I don’t know if the current codebase would allow users to set up a second “sub” without requiring them to create new accounts, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that it does. From there, don’t you think the biggest obstacle preventing this site from becoming the next Reddit would be the userbase?
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Using this definition of fascist, I’m forced to ask, what’s so bad about fascism?
This reminds me of Scott’s essay, “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words,” specifically this bit:
And later,
If “fascism” is just a neutral descriptor of one quadrant of the political graph, then supporting fascism should be no more controversial or upsetting than supporting libertarianism or neoliberalism or socialism, and it certainly shouldn’t result in people losing their minds TDS-style. But I think that there’s a bait and switch going on here, that labeling the socially-conservative-yet-fiscally-progressive quadrant “fascism” is a deliberate choice to poison the public discourse by tarring your political opponents as Hitler wannabes.
It’s the same tactic Greatest Generation and Boomer conservatives used when constantly decrying their political opponents as communists for supporting even a modicum of socialism, just in reverse. It seems to me that the tactic wasn’t particularly honest then, and it isn’t particularly honest now.
But again, if I’m wrong, and you’re using “fascism” in a neutral, judgement-free, purely descriptive sense, then what’s the the big deal? Why be so upset about fascism?
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