Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
11hr ago
once there is literally no space free from the towering presence of a trans stasi agent.
This, even in extremely-progressive (thus trans-friendly) spaces, is incredibly, ridiculously overstated.
Supah_Schmendrick
12hr ago
The mistake is thinking that there is any systematic "solution" that will avoid people sometimes being callow, manipulative, unempathetic, or simply mistaken in ways that result in broken hearts and worse.
I agree with the author that actually interacting with, and making informed decisions about, the individual people in front of you, is the most important thing - you can't rely on any ideology or heuristic to do the thinking for you. But I disagree because there is also a value to "purity" - having sex is a really major step in a relationship, and can really skew people's attitudes towards each other, and towards relationships in general.
Whether to have sex, and who to have sex with, really is an important decision with outsize importance - particularly for heterosexual women - and should be approached really, really carefully, given the young and immature ages at which young women become sexually attractive to men, and the drastically-different attitudes most men and most women have towards sex (see, e.g., the sexual habits of gay men vs. lesbian women).
Supah_Schmendrick
12hr ago
Supah_Schmendrick
12hr ago
aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom.
This isn't actually true. White people used to care about seeing people of their own race in their media, but during the Civil Rights era have pretty much stopped doing that. Black people, on the other hand, really want to see themselves, and haven't stopped. (source: Lenk, Hartmann & Sattler; "White Americans’ preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 years: A meta-analysis" PNAS, Vol. 121, No. 9)
Supah_Schmendrick
13hr ago
There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition
Bad history. The Inquisition was set up precisely to stop idiot rubes out in the sticks from freaking out about nonsense like "witches making the cows' milk dry up" and burning people. The Spanish crown then won a political struggle with the Papacy, asserted control over the office in the area under its secular jurisdiction, then started using it as a secret police against perceived fifth columnists and as a revenue source.
Supah_Schmendrick
13hr ago
It's not a terribly deep or positive thought, but I kinda yawned my way through this.
It's not that it's badly written, but more that it's formulaic. Ah yep - conservative religious upbringing that fails to actually describe recognizable relations between the sexes and settles for formulaic denunciations. Escapist fantasies of liberation that inevitably shatter on the weird, cold, and uncomfortable reefs of confusing interpersonal relations? Check. And next we'll have...yup, there it is...sublimation of the disappointment from those broken dreams into uncharitable takes on the opposite sex, complete with meme-tier statistics. Finally, we wrap up with white-knuckled clinging to any available validation for the hole the author's dug herself, a wistful call-back to liberatory fantasies, and a circle back to those conservative parents, who still remain fuddy-duddies.
And as a parthian shot, I have a hard time taking the author's complaints about the sexual marketplace seriously when she's literally an OnlyFans model. Bemoaning the lack of human connection in romantic matters and the reduction of women to "defective cumrags" rings mighty hollow from that position.
On the other hand, make that bag I guess.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
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.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Not saying you can't do this. Just that it's unpleasant.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d 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
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
6d 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
7d 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
10d ago
Supah_Schmendrick
14d 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
14d ago
There is no killing an idea for "the rest of human existence"
Supah_Schmendrick
14d 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
19d 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
20d 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
20d 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
20d 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
20d 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
1mo 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
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
Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.
Imagine a lithium-ion battery fire...the size of Pittsburgh!
Voltaire and anti-Catholic propaganda pervasive from the French Enlightenment through the Spanish Civil War, mostly.
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