ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
4d ago
Beneficial alleles might not coincide with the values or goals someone has for Homo sapiens. You could very well see e.g. rule following and neuroticism as good (either in themselves or in what function they perform in society), but they make carriers susceptible enough to behavioral defects to pull them out of the gene pool.
That article is great reporting; I feel like every line had a gem.
Take:
Anna has a boyfriend, whom she described as “a fucking Labrador”. “He’s reading books about how climate change isn’t actually that big a deal, and it’s hard to separate that from the fact that he’s not really faced much adversity in his life as a straight white man who was privately educated,” she said. “I’m probably the adversity in his life.”
Or:
Israel struck a Palestinian camp in Tel al-Sultan in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack caused a blaze that set tents alight and killed 45 people. Ash remembered watching videos of the attack, feeling cold and hopeless. Several women began openly weeping. The male students, meanwhile, were preoccupied with planning the next day’s protest. “I feel like sometimes men don’t feel the gravity of the thousands of people that have died,” Ash told me.
Wow.
But, my takeaway: you're imagining things. I direct this at both you and the interview subjects.
It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.
And so are they:
Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…”
This is a typical pattern: a man whispers Andrew Tate's name once, and it echoes a million times.
Her friend group can almost certainly be assumed to be nearly entirely college educated men. And a reasonable bet for the modal number of times they had engaged with a misogynistic reel is 0. Men absolutely have their electronic follies, but few suffer from social media addiction (the more usual error path is video game addiction or porn addiction). Men are on social media much less than women, and they spend much less time on it when they do.
It's a extremely weird gap in understanding of reality to me, akin to a man worrying that women were learning to hate and murder men by playing too many first person shooters.
ThenElection
5d ago
She was confirmed to have had sexual relationships with two Midwestern mayors, although there isn't anything credible I've seen saying the same was true of Swalwell. Probably comes down more to his ability to control himself and taste in women than Fang's boundaries.
ThenElection
5d ago
Castration also has a place.
ThenElection
5d ago
Values that demand they be treated as zero-sum outcompete those that don't demand an unlimited scope.
Americans get access to ridiculously opulent luxuries, like air conditioning and closets.
More options
Context Copy link