ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1d ago
Woman or bear: would you rather have to deal with a bear, or a woman who potentially has no water, food, or gear and needs your help to get to safety? I feel like the latter is more likely to ruin my day in the woods.
It's all just signalling, though; at most 1% would take the bear. Plenty of women go on hikes in the woods and regularly share the space with men without issue or note, and the few who encounter a bear would typically throw a fit over it. I read it as low-key trolling of men more than anything else. (And I have to admit, it's at least a little bit funny to see some men seemingly taking the question at face value and getting testy over something that obviously bears no relation to reality.) It's like someone joking they'd rather have a blind person drive them around than someone from California.
ThenElection
1d ago
ThenElection
15d ago
For better or worse, DEI identity slop is now considered left wing, and NPR has oodles of that, regardless of whatever other establishment propaganda it peddles.
ThenElection
17d ago
By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?
ThenElection
16d ago
Men have duties. Women have rights.
It is as it ever will be, and no matter the rational arguments you muster for equal treatment, you will never convince anyone who's bought into this mindset. At best, you'll get a rhetorical concession, before the principle is promptly forgotten when the next discussion comes up.
ThenElection
8d ago
Even on conscription, it's not particularly remarkable: individuals don't necessarily like being conscripted, but can accept/support conscriptions as a legitimate and even necessary component of defense.
Do you have links to this polling? If it shows a majority of draft-age Ukrainian men support conscription as implemented, it would probably shift my view of the conflict.
ThenElection
16d ago
You can understand, though, why this would be nuclear-tier propaganda as opposed to something bizarre? If a male is being forced at gunpoint to go to the front while his female counterpart is out partying on Tinder in Germany, is it surprising that the male would find it unfair and be resentful?
Echoing the other respondents, this is just how people react to travelers/tourists; I'm nowhere near as attractive as him and have similar experiences. On my last trip to Mexico City, I made friends with an abuela who treated me to a family dinner in her small one room apartment. She even accommodated my dietary preferences: after telling her I was a vegetarian and didn't eat meat, she happily made a bunch of fish for us to eat (which I did anyway without complaint, because who turns down a delicious home cooked meal?)
ThenElection
16d ago
Women are the primary victims of war, etc.
Name any stupid war, and people will always ask why did the countries keep on fighting even though it was obviously to everyone's detriment. Who cares about Alsace-Lorraine or Kashmir, when it would be better for everyone involved if they just quit fighting and focused on the pragmatics of making money and living life in a stable environment?
Then you have Ukraine, and all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is maps from centuries ago or maintaining a precedent for the liberal world order, and everyone rallies around the idea that we must make massive sacrifices for a bit of soil. ("We," in this context, is the kind of we that is mostly composed of young Russian and Ukrainian men, not the person making the statement.)
ThenElection
8d ago
Thanks for the link. And, yes, it did shift my views toward more Ukraine support (never anti-Ukraine, but more concerned with male wellbeing and disposability). As much as I'd love a poll that got into the nitty gritty of what exactly Ukrainian men think of current conscription/mobilization policy, that seems unlikely, and this poll does suggest they're broadly supportive of it, at least in principle, and I can't think of any quibbles that'd reverse the results.
ThenElection
15d ago
VoA is, surprisingly, a lot more balanced than most mainstream media (although of course it reflects US priorities). It serves an actual purpose, and to achieve that it can't just be American Pravda.
As a 5'3" guy... yes, it is a major impediment. It doesn't preclude relationships or even casual hookups, but it substantially increases search time and costs.
Back in my online dating days, I did some experiments, and every two inch increase roughly doubled my match rate, with diminishing returns starting around 5'10" (typical results for my profile: one match per week at real height, 3-5 matches per day at 5'10, with me swiping right on about half of profiles). That said, results in the real world are much less bleak, though it still acts as an impediment.
ThenElection
13d ago
that young man who killed young women
Are you referring to Elliot Rodger? He killed four men and two women.
He was at least as much misandric as misogynistic.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I dug up the actual serious report mentioned:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907
It's not the greatest study (surprise, surprise), but not terrible for the field. What gets me is just how warped the Independent and Vice articles are in how they cover it. It's like they saw it and dug through it looking for any one statement or finding that could be twisted into something as ridiculous and inflammatory as possible, ignoring the layers of caveats, dropping mention of findings that contradict their preferred theory, and taking a weak correlation and turning it into a strong causal claim.
Neither link directly to the article, though Vice does to the university press release (which itself commits all the same sins, albeit to a lesser extent). It's a big chain of laundering a somewhat interesting but weak (and contested) correlation into an explosive claim.
The critical mistake here is taking any of this media reporting as reflective of any part of reality, instead of just being fiction written to belittle perceived enemies. The only question is why the media wants to paint having agency as some kind of evil.
ThenElection
16d ago
Nuclear may be an overstatement; effective is probably a better word. Although Ukrainian soldiers likely know what's going on, the propaganda's goal is not to inform but to increase the salience of that fact.
ThenElection
8d ago
It seems like there are three possible states to your knowledge variable: unknown, believed, and disbelieved.
Maybe I'd coin the word "delief" for that.
ThenElection
16d ago
Suppose military service were entirely voluntary. Do you expect there would be a substantial drop in the number of military recruits? If conscription doesn't conscript many people who don't want to fight on the front, why is Ukraine strengthening penalties for evasion and expanding conscription operations?
ThenElection
14d ago
Hapa, though white passing.
ThenElection
16d ago
I mean, I kind of get it: if I were in Ukraine, I'd rather be in the Western sphere than the Russian sphere, Putin is an asshole who launched this whole war, and the US is getting to screw with a rival for comparative pennies. But at some point you've got to consider the humanitarian cost: I might prefer being in one sphere or another, but I'd always prefer being in either sphere peacefully than being blown apart by a shell in a war zone.
It seems to me that the resolution of the conflict remains wide open.
The resolution, yes; the outcome, no. Appalling amounts of lives and infrastructure have been destroyed, and whatever lines end up being drawn up on the map, the people of those countries deciding the lines will be dead or impoverished. It's only a question at this point of how many dead and how impoverished.
It may be up to the Ukrainian people to decide whether it's worth fighting on, but I'd point out that in that poll, 42% favor negotiations to end the war. I'd be curious to see crosstabs: are the young men being forced at gunpoint asked to sacrifice most well-represented in the small majority who favor continuing the war without negotiations?
ThenElection
13d ago
Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect,
If Sotomayor is as strong a justice as Scalia, then yes, your argument holds and Democrats should keep her on the court. Scalia had a high VORP.
ThenElection
16d ago
Ukrainian women are doing nothing wrong. If I were one, my immediate response would be to GTFO of Ukraine as quickly as possible. As it became clear that the war will last a long time and even once resolved will leave Ukraine a ruined place, I'd then look to settle down in whatever safe country I could find, ideally a relatively well-off one, which would likely involve finding a partner from that country. Maybe I'd use Tinder, if I were foolish. Regardless, in general it's not something I'd begrudge them, and given the option, I'd expect most would rather have stayed in a peaceful Ukraine and married a Ukrainian man. Unfortunately that option's not on the table, so they make do with the options that they're actually presented with.
The central issue is that men are being prevented from doing the exact same thing.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It all comes down to Sergey and Larry, IMO. They wanted to try lots of off the wall things with their newfound power and wealth without being subject to market discipline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (except to investors). One option would be to just start new companies, but that's a bit more complicated than just starting random projects within your existing company. So people were hired to enable those things, and the ads revenue not only continued but increased exponentially, so hiring continued.
I'm a vegetarian, and I would kill for a nice porterhouse. Although I probably know a couple of vegetarians/vegans who'd probably be upset that they'd lose the moral justification for the defining part of their personality, the large majority would absolutely start eating steak given the chance.
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