Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Who do you think goes to all the public hearings on building permits and bitches that the new rowhouse or apartment building "destroys the character of the neighborhood?" Who do you think leverages historic building designations to keep anything from being built? Who do you think files the CEQA lawsuits (okay, that's mostly unions pissed off that developers don't want to use "prevailing wage" labor).
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Well, the appeal of living in gigantic skyscrapers does diminish a bit when you're living in an earthquake zone. Even being in a fourth floor apartment during a 3.2 a few years back was a deeply unpleasant experience, and I say this as someone who slept through the '92 Northridge quake as a kid.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead. But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.
You're missing something. There are three separate states being talked about here.
(1) the anguish of mentally-anticipating the pain of being raped.
(2) the in-the-moment physical experience of being raped.
(3) the mental anguish experienced in the wake of being raped, through recollections, PTSD, etc.
Each of these three is a separate experience, all tied to the concept of "being raped." A rape victim who says they wish the had died instead of being raped may well be saying that, now knowing what (2) and (3) are like, she would have preferred to never go through them and die instead without having had those experiences. But, having gone through them, dying now would not retroactively alleviate the anguish that has been already experienced.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Not saying you can't do this. Just that it's unpleasant.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
Yeah, where else in history has a populist, vernacular, radically anti-clerical, vegetarian, dualist form of Christianity that denied the literal truth of the eucharist ever popped up? Clearly with the death of the Cathars all prospects for a pacifistic, gender-egalitarian Christianity died forever and for all time.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value.
With respect, it's more than just a signal. It's also staking out a coordination point for like-minded people to rally around and to pool efforts/resources. That coordination and massing of support, in turn, unlocks the ability to pressure weakly-allied parties into line, and intimidate enemies.
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
I don't know why paid parasocial entertainment isn't really a thing in the western world,
As to bar girls, it's very illegal under most states' alcohol laws (the employment of companion-girls, the act of drink solicitation, accepting a drink from a patron, or some combination of all three).
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were. Contemporary young UMC men also seeing their wages diluted by women's entry into the labor market and rising housing costs. The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Running a household used to be a complex operation requiring the deployment of a lot of different technical and personal skills as well as management and long-term planning. If modern labor-saving machinery and industrial techniques have obsoleted this role and made people unhappier, perhaps that might have implications for the obsoleting of further social roles and jobs via technology.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
Supah_Schmendrick
30d ago
White Colonization could not have happened in the first place without a much smaller number of White Men subjugating a much larger population of indigenous peoples in all cases. India, relative to its population size, was controlled by the British with an extremely small elite pool.
This is very bad history. Colonization in India occurred not because a few god-like white people showed up and crushed all before them, but instead because very clever and ruthless opportunists, through a combination of skill and luck, managed to co-opt local power structures by backing challengers to weak overlords. The British didn't rule India in their own name; they slowly accumulated alliances and legal rights and privileges through local intermediaries.
There's a myth that the Aztecs interpreted the arrival of Spanish Conquistadores as fulfilling a prophecy of the return of the Aztec's gods.
This is also very bad history. The Aztecs didn't think Cortez was a god - they in fact whipped his men out of Tenochtitlan in La Noche Triste, after killing the collaborator Moctezuma. Instead, Cortez proved himself a diplomat of no small skill, and put together a coalition of the Aztec's subject peoples which ultimately strangled Tenochtitlan, and then entered into negotiated political relationships with the Spanish crown. The influx of more and more Spaniards into the region, coupled with the massive disruption to Mexica society caused by the plagues of the Columbian exchange, was what finalized the ultimate subjugation of the locals.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
DeSantis is on the same bandwagon:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday his state “will not comply” with recently unveiled changes to Title IX by the Biden administration.
“Florida rejects [President Biden’s] attempt to rewrite Title IX,” DeSantis said in a video posted to the social platform X. “We will not comply, and we will fight back.”
“We are not gonna let Joe Biden try to inject men into women’s activities,” DeSantis continued. “We are not gonna let Joe Biden undermine the rights of parents, and we are not gonna let Joe Biden abuse his constitutional authority to try to impose these policies on us here in Florida.”
The Biden administration unveiled a final set of changes to Title IX last week that add protections for transgender students to the federal civil rights law on sex-based discrimination. The changes will take effect in early August.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
There is no killing an idea for "the rest of human existence"
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter?
Civilly, quite possibly! (Caveat, I'm not a Michigan lawyer so this isn't legal advice, but my Westlaw subscription includes Michigan cases and I'm bored). Michigan recognizes the tort of negligent entrustment, and there are several cases in which parents are found liable for permitting incompetent minors to drive. Dortman v. Lester (1968) 380 Mich. 80; Zokas v. Friend (1984) 134 Mich.App. 437
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Oral argument of Loper-Bright Ent. v. Raimondo, where the question presented is explicitly whether to overturn Chevron, was back in January. Relentless, Inc. v. Dep't. of Commerce, a related case with a similar QP was heard the same day. Decisions for cases heard this term have to be issued by summer.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Why would Israel do this? Some conjectures:
Iran's strike from its own territory appears to be, in my admittedly imperfect knowledge, rather unprecedented in the history of tit-for-tat strikes between the two countries. Historically, the strikes on Israel have come from Iranian proxies, not Iran itself. Even with the telegraphed nature of the 4/13-4/14 strikes (allegedly Iran told the US exactly what flight-paths the drones/missiles would be on?!?!?) Israel wouldn't want to let the precedent stand that Iran can launch on targets in Israel proper without Israel having grounds to strike at Iranian targets inside Iran in retaliation.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?
Yes.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.
Imagine a lithium-ion battery fire...the size of Pittsburgh!
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I mean, the narrative I was taught in school was that there were a lot of different ways that Nazis killed jews - rounded up and shot in the wake of Wehrmacht conquests, beaten/burned to death in pogroms, worked/starved to death in slave labor camps, and yes, gassed in extermination camps. All of which was tied together by the Nazi's fairly-consistent rhetoric that Jews were the ethnic enemy of Germans and should be killed. The idea that it's "6 million gassed" or complete denial/revision seems like a really bad strawman to me.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?
People often are, particularly about personal preferences.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I'm not sure this post proves what you want it to re: the utility/necessity of reprisals. As I read it, it claims that the insurgencies in Iraq were broken by:
(1) coopting moderate factions inside the (Sunni) insurgencies and relying on them to do the dirty work themselves (does anyone want to bet that those Sunni militias didn't target civilian supporters of the radical factions as well as combatants under arms?), or (2) allowing the (Shiite) insurgencies to more-or-less achieve their objectives, which included withdrawal of US troops and ethnic cleansing of enemy civilians from insurgent-controlled areas.
Neither of those are particularly happy outcomes, and neither would be acceptable in the Israeli/Palestinian context.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments have a huge incentive to do accurate censuses for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and economic planning.
There are also incentives for various players in government to fudge census figures for purposes of representational allotment, project funding, public relations, etc. Not saying it happened in any particular instance, but we can't just point to an incentive here; census accounts have to be researched and justified like any other historical record/document.
One thing that you're missing is that the old life-script involved people doing a lot of things themselves that today we assume have to be done by others. That phrase "If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife" covered a lot of tasks that took a lot more time than they would today: making and repairing clothes from scratch; managing household expenses in an era where everyone was objectively a lot poorer; cooking when the vast majority of all meals were home affairs, including making such basic staples as bread from scratch; cleaning without the use of labor-saving devices like washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners; and other types of home production.
Similarly, the male role involved doing things like building one's own house, as well as general mechanical and skilled labor competency. And for the things you didn't do yourself, you were expected to have sufficient ties to the local community that others could come and assist you (mutual aid societies, fraternal organizations, etc.). Having these sorts of skills and making/repairing almost all of your consumable goods drastically lowers the cost of living (at the expense of requiring a lot of effort).
Of course, mechanization got rid of most of these tasks from ordinary daily life. It's a truism that domestic appliances, drive thrus, and the supermarket, by trivializing the important household tasks that women had historically provided, did a lot to bring about second-wave feminist unrest. As for the rest of us, we also have been substituting capital goods and machinery for skilled labor as fast as we can. This simultaneously makes it more expensive to "grow up" and make your own life, and makes the average individual less skilled and thus less capable of handling the various problems they're likely to encounter in the world.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Ursula's not just a villain - she was (allegedly) inspired by a drag queen, she has a special relationship as an unabashedly proud and powerful fat woman, and on and on. You can't just have her say actually bad things, because the people who care way too much about the movie she's in (aka the target audience of the movie) can't and don't see her as evil, and are ideologically committed to reclaiming her.
I'm not sure what culture you're from/what tropes you're dealing with, but the idea that "women don't care about politics" hasn't been a significant part of anglosphere culture for at least the last 200 years, as far as I can tell. Instead, women have been at the forefront of just about every moralistic movement that I can think of in the anglosphere, from religious awakenings, the abolition of slavery, progressive uplift of the lower-classes, anti-alcoholism, anti-drugs, etc. A certain species of feminine moral busybodying over far-away causes actually gets lampooned from time to time in mainstream anglosphere literature.
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