ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
6mo ago
Accept is the key word that needs some refinement. Migrants are entirely free to try to change society in their image. Their host society is entirely free to say "lol no." So long as both non-violently accept the outcome of that negotiation, it's all above board.
The issue many rightists have is that their host society instead goes "meh, just let me have my McDonald's, reality TV, and video games, and you can do whatever you like." That's arguably a bad outcome, but it's entirely on the natives for allowing the situation to develop like it did.
ThenElection
6mo ago
It's consistent: if it isn't clear, I think both Israel and Hamas are the prisoners who murder an innocent guard for no reason, just to make a point, which is reprehensible.
That said, it's a bullet I'm willing to bite: if either Hamas or Israel had a solution that killed thousands of innocents that actually managed to solve their problems, I'd consider it morally acceptable. (That said, I'm rooting for Israel's vision for the region over Hamas's, but I classify that as an aesthetic preference, not a moral one.)
ThenElection
1yr ago
I stand corrected.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses). They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the existing state of affairs (das Bestehende), that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, etc.
Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So be it’.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I'd also make explicit that I mean here for defectors to include men as well: there's inevitably a guy, if put into a scenario where all the women give gentle negative reinforcement to bad approaches, who will then proceed to aggressively ignore all signs of discomfort and approach any and every woman, and if called out plead ignorance and good intention. Which itself doesn't approach the level of rape, but it makes the setup unsustainable.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Humans can't count as high as 100, and {"maybe", "possibly", "probably", "likely", "definitely", "almost certainly"} aren't shorthand for different numbers. Remember that, at scale, people don't differentiate between 95p and 99p and 99.99p.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I wonder: I currently have a significant and leveraged position in real estate. My expectations for medium-term performance of real estate are now lower than what they were originally; exiting that position is expensive, though. What's the rational way to compensate?
ThenElection
2mo ago
I agree. But by the same token, too many men are falling into the same trap: "I'm mediocre because the world is biased against me, giving unfair preferences to everyone else."
Sociologically, one or neither (or both!) may be true. But if you embrace victimhood as part of your identity, you're dooming yourself.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Socrates was a pederast, at least as suggested by Plato. And Plato himself seems to have been ambivalent toward pederasty, at least in his earlier works. Shall we toss them out too? What about Turing, whose castration followed an inappropriate relationship with a teenager?
COVID did have one positive lasting effect: masking on public transit. In many East Asian cities, it was normalized/acceptable preceding the pandemic for the purposes of limiting the risk of the flu and the common cold, and I'm glad wearing a mask on crowded subways won't be considered weirdo territory.
As far as broken people and their brains, though, the most significant social COVID risk is on education. Most immediately, students suffered severe learning loss, both for the material they were supposed to learn and the processes needed for learning. We'll see those effects for a lifetime. But the institutional and cultural changes driven by COVID are also significant. COVID laid bare the reality that the institutions responsible for education aren't really interested in education: learning and intellectual development may be good side effects, but they're not the primary goals. And institutions have learned this lesson. If some desired policy results in plummeting test scores, that's to the discredit of the test scores, not the damaging policy. This has been happening for awhile, but COVID tempered that principle. Schools, informed by the experience of COVID, will increasingly discard objective measures of learning and student well-being for the sake of alignment with the faddish ideas of the day. That's the long COVID we need to worry about.
ThenElection
2mo ago
An internal locus of control gives you better outcomes, regardless of how valid a particular complaint is. Even if it is insanity, it's a useful insanity.
I have no idea if the particular woman in the example above actually faced unfairness or not (she probably has; at some point we all have). But I do know she'd be in a better position, financially and psychologically, if she spent less time introspecting about how mean and terrible and unjust the world is to her and more time embracing her agency.
ThenElection
1yr ago
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i14.pdf
An estimated 4,000 school building fires were reported by United States fire departments each year
Optimizing for relatively rare events at the cost of more commonplace ones is bad policy.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Why does it need a solution or an answer? Men can either deal with it or not; if they don't, they're out of the sexual market, and if they do, well, they have access to sex and relationships. Women have the negotiating edge in the dating market, so they can set the price of entry to whatever they want. I'd also add that, anecdotally, most men in my social circles don't really care about n-count, going both by what they say and how they act (i.e. who they choose to date, where there's at least a dozen factors that take precedence).
ThenElection
5d ago
Bay Area housing is expensive because its workers tend to be far more economically productive than most areas in the US.
Reason not to be reactionary: it allows me to live in the Bay Area, with the alternative being stuck in the same shithole podunk town where I grew up and the only nightlife after 9PM is hanging out at the local Walmart.
ThenElection
6mo ago
massive net positive of arabs staying put in their home towns.
It's been three quarters of a century since their grandparents lived in those towns, and the vast majority of Palestinians haven't ever even seen their "home towns," which don't even exist anymore in any meaningful sense.
ThenElection
9mo ago
Going with the spousal example, it's not equally optimal for both to choose red and both to choose blue. Both choosing blue is superior to both choosing red, because the very act of both choosing blue is indicative of stronger bonds and itself reenforces them.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Did I call him a pedophile? Just pointed out that he had an age-inappropriate relationship with a teenager, which is true.
The broader point is that sexual peccadilloes don't matter one way or another in terms of the value of someone's work, and (secondarily) cultural context matters. In the case of Foucault etc, they lived in a milieu where society hadn't yet decided that having sex with a teenager who was not yet of age was the Worst Thing Ever.
ThenElection
1yr ago
It's a good question. Local officials were told by Florida's Office of Election Crimes and Security to do the process as best they could and that they wouldn't be at fault. Probably it'd make the most sense for Governor DeSantis to order an investigation of whoever the Office of Election Crimes reports to, as the big fuck up seems to be there.
I take a view that "genocide" rhetoric has been diluted to be meaningless.
No moral politics can accept genocide. But nowadays genocide is thrown about so casually that it's a meaningless term. The Jewish genocide, the Palestinian genocide, the Xinjiang genocide, the white genocide, the trans genocide.
Genocide is the mass slaughter of people based purely on their ancestral heritage. No one--not Israelis, and not Hamas--either publically or privately wants or plans for genocide. There are bad things outside genocide different sides may want, but they are desires centered on power, not murder as an end in itself. The fact that Hamas wants an Islamic caliphate from river to sea (to sea and sea again) is about as far from actual genocide as can be imagined: if Jews peacefully accepted Islamic dominance (and ideally converted), Hamas would be plenty content and wouldn't kill anyone.
Israeli culture, despite its flaws, is better than Palestinian culture, so many people want it to win. But they're uncomfortable acknowledging that some cultures are better than others, so they feel the need to frame Israeli desires as desires to avoid genocide. They're not: they're a desire to maintain Israeli dominance over Palestine because the alternative is worse, and that's a good thing.
I think Barbie is just a (good) movie, and it's a mistake to read too much politics into it. Although the media commentary on it and the typical moviegoer probably reads the narrative through a typical feminist interpretative lens, it allows for other ones as well: Barbieland isn't some egalitarian utopia, and the movie doesn't try to portray the Barbiarchy as some ideal state. There's a bit of dialog that overdoes it a bit, but it doesn't dominate the movie. It's only the most shallow interpetation to think it's all about how awesome girlbossing is.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I suspect that a very attractive man would have suffered a similar outcome to the poster, although perhaps with less social blowback and maybe later unsolicited requests for sex from other women.
The issue is that there's no guarantee that the partnership will continue. Imagine a 23 year old woman who pairs with a similarly situated man and agrees with the traditional breakdown of labor. 10 years later, the man will be in a much more powerful position than her: if he reneges on the deal, he'll be better situated than she was and can take the large majority of the extra human capital that accrued due to the agreement to continue his job and find a new (younger, hotter, more in line with his ideal) partner. Alimony/child support/splitting of assets doesn't help the wife much there. And the woman will be older, have kids, and will have basically nuked her position in the job market; any future jobs or partners will be much worse than if she had not chosen to enter the initial agreement.
And that's a real risk. It's entirely rational for her to want to hedge her bets by building her career at the expense of fertility.
Another hypothesis (not committing to it, but just putting it out there):
The thefts may be intentionally gendered, but in a non-fetishistic way. Concretely, Brinton may carry a lot of resentment toward women, for having the social space to buy and wear the clothing designated as "for women." Stealing them allows him/they to enact a kind of an eye for an eye kind of justice: society has unjustly taken away my ability to present as a woman without repercussions, so I'm going to level the playing field by taking away from you the material goods denied to me so I can use them.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Interestingly, gay men also tend to be shorter than straight men (OkCupid post; or, an actual study). Perhaps non-normative sexual identities are generally driven by failure to have social success within a normative straight, cis identity.
China has a material advantage in the local theater, but the best it can hope for is getting its neighbors to commit to neutrality (and at least Japan will not, and it still has meaningful shipyards). The US also can shut down Malacca.
Everyone's economy will be f'ed, but if China can't win in the span of ~9 months, it has lost. That said, I don't reject the possibility of it winning in that duration: there are just too many uncertainties to call an outcome.
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