MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
16hr ago
The experience of foreign companies doing business in China is not this. China absolutely uses threats to Apple's supply chain in China as a tool to influence the output of Apple TV in the US, as an example.
Or to put it another way, "Openly provoking China" sometimes includes saying things which are patriotic boilerplate in your home country.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
17hr ago
If a woman planning to get married and have children eventually ends up with fewer children than she wants because she marries late and ages out of her fertility window, then the ultimate cause of having too few children is failure to marry younger. In other words she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference.
The point I am making is that, assuming you accept that women are at least directionally truthful about how many children they actually want and why they didn't have that many, is that the problem lies in the relationship between men and women, not the behaviour of women in isolation. While true as a matter of biology, @Tintin's point that women don't need anything valuable from men (sperm is cheap) to reproduce is irrelevant in practice given that respectable working class and above women don't reproduce without male investment, and society doesn't want them to.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
18hr ago
FLDS violate a lot of federal (and state) laws about polygamy, rape, statutory rape etc. The outside world considers this victimful crimes against their own women, and is appropriately (given our own moral standards) outraged. So FLDS largely have to live sub rosa.
The only victimful crime Haredim commit is rorting the public fisc*, which a lot of Americans wrongly consider victimless when done by someone sympathetic. They can do this openly as long as their political machines can provide them with cover.
*Not just welfare fraud - Haredi-controlled municipalities like Kiryas Joel and the Haredi political machine in NYC commit a much larger range of rorts, many of which are technically criminal.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
19hr ago
Isn't this just a matter of sex ratio? The denominator in TFR is the number of women and ignores men. Societies as a whole have a 1:1 effective sex ratio, so this doesn't normally matter when comparing. But individual communities which don't reproduce biologically can have unbalanced sex ratios. Oil towns and military base communities have a lot of surplus men, so if the limiting reagent for family formation is mostly rather than entirely female, then they will naturally have more kids per woman.
In Western culture, polygyny and bastardy are (very) low status, and the main reason women give for having fewer children than they claim to want is a lack of quality men to have them with. If this is even partly true, then it is obvious how "have enough spare men around that all women who want kids can get a man who wants kids, and a crappy woman can nail down a mediocre man and a mediocre woman can nail down a decent man" increases births-per-woman.
I suspect something similar is going on in the other direction with collapsing Mormon fertility. Monogamy norms are even stronger in post-1904 Mormonism than in the wider society, and the Church has a problem with male defection meaning that the sex ratio is female-heavy. Anecdotally, babies-per-marriageable-couple is still high among Mormons, but babies-per-woman is falling off a cliff as not every woman can get married.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
21hr ago
Not many career violent and property criminals nowadays - in a world where TVs are cheap, stolen phones get bricked remotely, and people don't carry large amounts of cash it isn't lucrative enough, particularly compared to drug dealing or online scams and fraud. In addition, sentences for repeat offenders are still harsher than they were in the Hippie Era such that you can't just write an occasional week in jail off as a cost of doing business.
There are specific niches where you see career property criminals, like shoplifting in San Francisco and fencing it on Facebook Marketplace, or pickpocketing tourists almost everywhere, but nothing like the situation in the 1990's where you could make a career as a burglar or mugger. Ask a beat cop or a local politician in a high-crime area and they will say that most property crime nowadays is committed by junkies who need cash fast for their next fix.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
22hr ago
Given that my wife is 45, was subfertile, and is now properly infertile after a botched IVF cycle when we tried for a third child that way, there would be loud rejoicing, expressing thanks for a miracle.
I do not think I am particularly unusual in thinking this way among older parents.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
22hr ago
Western concerns about China's treatment of Falun Gong predates the Epoch Times - in PMC liberal circles in the UK existence of the Epoch Times has probably weakened the Falun Gong cause by making it vaguely right-coded.
When I was a student in Cambridge in the noughties the Red Chinese government was broadly unpopular for a constellation of reasons, the local student Amnesty group made persecution of Falun Gong one of their key campaigns several years running, and there was a large Falun Dafa mediation/exercise group that existed largely to troll the Red Chinese.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
The boats are carrying cocaine. Assuming that the maps and accompanying discussion in glossy reports produced by various anti-drug orgs (pre-2025 US, UN and NGO-produced reports broadly agree) are correct, most of the cocaine on these specific boats is not ultimately heading for the US.
Some cocaine enters the US by boat after island-hopping across the Caribbean, but most cocaine landed in Trinidad, Suriname, or the Dominican Republic is going to be smuggled in air passenger baggage into the relevant European country with historical links, at which point in can then move freely within the EU (and in practice almost freely to the UK or Switzerland). European street prices for cocaine are currently more than double US ones, so that is more lucrative for the smugglers.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?
Because there are lots of all-male teams by default, and the ones which self-define as trans lesbians don't get cancelled for being all-male?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Was "retarded" or "retard" ever used as a specific technical term allowing fine distinctions in the way "moron", "imbecile" and "idiot" (in increasing order of retardation) were? I am not an expert, but I think "retarded" was the first turn of the euphemism treadmill after idiot/imbecile/moron became un-PC, and "retard" has never been anything except a schoolboy insult derived from "retarded".
I don't think the euphemism treadmill applies to warrior/soldier though - the people talking about "warriors" think that both "warrior" and "soldier" are both strongly positive descriptions that you wouldn't want to euphemise.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
I think "forcing a conflation" and "erasing a distinction" are synonyms. The whole point that @quiet_NaN is making, and which I endorse, is that "warrior" and "soldier" are different words with different meanings, and that the US Army and US Marine Corps are, and should be, soldiers, and mostly are not, and should not be, warriors.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother's place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They're not tyrants. They're just Indian parents, which means they're constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved.
For all the educated girls from non-WEIRD cultures I knew, "he's a doctor - and no he's not married, you know I'm not that kind of girl" would have made this problem 90% less troublesome than you are making it out to be, or in some cases 110% (as in her mother would have become an actual ally). Was this true in her parents' corner of Indian culture?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Erasing the warrior-soldier distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about violence professionals, and in particular to call out certain failure modes in civil-military relations.
Erasing the warrior-curmudgeon distinction is bad for the same reasons.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
My read is that systematic abuse of disability programs (i.e. everyone in the system knows and does not care that the people getting the bennies are not as disabled as they are claiming to be) by white men between 50 and retirement age, particularly in poorer areas, is widespread and unofficially tolerated in many countries, including the US. In the UK this has been the case since the mid-1980's - despite multiple ineffective government crackdowns.
I agree that social welfare programs are not for able-bodied young males.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
By social stereotype of the era, the fathers of the bastards were high-status men (whether or not married yet), not men who were too poor to marry.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically.
Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. (I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment even though the proximate cause of not having more kids is age-related infertility.)
As a matter of physical reality, your point 2 is correct - women can reproduce without male investment. But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been. In practice, it is also dependent on a system of government transfers - raising kids in third-world poverty is illegal for good reasons, and you can't raise kids in first-world poverty as a single mother on a lower-middle-class salary without supplementing it with child support or government bennies.
I note that the political faction that is most worried about falling fertility wants to dismantle the public subsidies for single mothers and reinforce the systems that make them low-status. Nobody who thinks low fertility is a problem thinks encouraging single women to pop out more bastards is the solution.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Agreed, which kind of makes the point. You may aspire to be let's say a warrior of Christ despite degenerate "epicurean liberal" consensus. I think it captures the ethos of masculinity - to be disagreeable toward degenerate ideas despite it being unpopular to an extent, where you are willing to be martyred for it. It does not mean that you will commit violent acts of terrorism of course, but some bravery and confidence in righteousness of your worldview is commendable. You can maybe start with unabashedly saying blessings before eating your lunch in Google canteen. Very warrior like behavior.
Priests and warriors are not the same thing. Both are traditionally masculine roles, particularly in the Christian West, and both are supposed to cultivate the kind of moral and religious basedness you are talking about here. But the warrior isn't supposed to be martyred - he's supposed to send the infidel to his "martyrdom". From a warrior's perspective, saying blessings unabashedly while undercover in enemy territory doesn't make you badass, it makes you an idiot.
In the context of this sub-thread, "warrior" isn't a metaphor for someone who tries to achieve something against determined opposition - it is a reference to people who make actual, real-world physical violence a way of life. Warrior-elites in this strict sense are a key feature of most societies. The taming of warrior elites into aristocracies who only fight the enemy, not among themselves, is part of the transition from barbarism into civilisation.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Medicare, medicaid and SS also give some opportunity for grift, and so does defense budget
Medicaid is mostly block granted to states, so no room for grift at the federal level. SS is mostly giving money to oldsters, where grift is hard. (Uncle Sam knows your date of birth and contribution record). There is significant retail rorting of SSDI, but mostly by Red Tribers so not something a Trump-led DOGE would want to go after.
Medicare and military procurement are where the big grift is, and therefore where it makes sense to start if you want to root out waste, fraud and efficiency. In terms of who should lead such an effort, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) is the US government's leading expert on Medicare fraud, having led one of the largest Medicare frauds in history as CEO of Columbia/HCA. Another expert on Medicare fraud who owes Trump a favour is Phil Esformes, who bilked Medicare out of $1.3 billion before being pardoned by Trump.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
This is a very strange word use problem that I suspect stems from the stick up the arse of the USMC. US Marines are not an elite amphibious expeditionary force like the modern Royal Marines, or seaborne troops who specialise in boarding actions like the OG marines. (In so far as that latter expertise still exists, it sits in the law enforcement function of the Coast Guard). US Marines are, in fact, soldiers in the traditional English meaning of the word, which is the sense that Dr Deveraux of ACOUP and the Angry Staff Officer are using. But as part of their effort to maintain a distinctive culture, mission etc. from the army the USMC profoundly object to being called "soldiers".
My guess is that someone sympathetic to the USMC started using "warrior" as a general term for soldiers and marines and it stuck, rather than someone deliberately trying to end up on the wrong side of the soldier/warrior distinction.
When British politicians want to talk about soldiers in a way which includes things like the Royal Marines and the RAF Regiment, they tend to say "troops".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
There is an alternative reading where Scrooge represents Puritan austerity (which was specifically opposed to the secular aspects of Christmas celebrations, with Cromwell's major-generals sending their most pious soldiers out to confiscate overly-rich Christmas dinners) and the Weberian "Protestant work ethic". The arguments Scrooge uses on the pleasant portly gentlemen were real political positions used by real right-liberals as the basis for important legislation at the time Dickens was writing, and the real people saying these things saw themselves as pious Protestants and justified their positions in Weberian terms.
Given the social context Dickens was writing in, the anti-Weberian reading seems more plausible than the antisemitic reading, although the nature of great fiction is that both are present in the text, and it is almost certain that both were present in Dickens' brain.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
I think Jews see all conspiracy theories as latently antisemitic because of bitter experience - most conspiracy theorists and conspiracy-focused political movements will eventually graduate to Jewish conspiracies and old-fashioned anti-semitism. This process appears to be happening to Zoomer MAGA as we speak.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
So "declare war on Islam" means treating Muslims roughly the same way you want to treat all nonwhite immigrants in the US? That isn't a standard sense of the term "war".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Most Israelis marrying outside Israel are heterosexual secular Jews who don't want a religious marriage for one of any number of good and sufficient reasons, or who the official Rabbinate refuses to marry for reasons which I am sure the Rabbis find very persuasive. I have met multiple couples in such marriages, including one case where the Israeli Rabbinate considered a British-born Reform Rabbi insufficiently Jewish to marry an Israeli Jew.
That Israel recognises foreign marriages, including foreign marriages between Israeli Jews, and therefore including same-sex marriages, is a load-bearing part of the social contract between secular and religious Jews in Israel.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
American Jews support the American left (for now, although they are shifting right). Jews everywhere else are right wing. Especially the Israeli Jews.
Secular, Conservative and Reform Jews support the left. Modern Orthodox Jews support the right, although they only do so noisily in Israel. Haredi and Hasidic Jews support whoever the Rebbe sells their votes to, which in both the US and Israel in 2025 is mostly the right. (In 20th century Israel the auction was more blatant and sometimes the left was the high bidder).
The reason why American Jews are left-wing is that they are less likely to be Orthodox. I rounded up some statistics here.
Although anecdote from people who work in the for-profit fertility industry is that they select on height a lot more strongly than on IQ or other potentially eugenic qualities.
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