ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
No bio...
User ID: 822
Canada is basically what the US would look like if NYC, DC, and San Francisco had absolute control. The US doesn't have this problem because they intentionally structured their government to prevent a couple of states from dominating all the others; the Canadian system is by contrast specifically intended to encourage this (as are all polities that use the British model as a base). All executive power is downstream of whoever holds the legislature here as well, so even in a situation where one party can't get the rest of the country to agree with them that party still has an outsized amount of control.
All [relevant] votes in the legislature are on party line, so Canadian parties don't have to deal with the problem US parties have when their representatives sometimes decide to put their constituents first. You're not really even voting for a representative here, just a party.
So provided its largest cities can be set against the rest of the nation (and just like in the US, they are, with significant regularity), which is the usual electoral strategy, it's not meaningfully different than imperial domination over the rest of the nation (I get that some people will claim "but democracy therefore it's valid", forgetting that consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed).
The rest of the nation is not only culturally distinct from its largest cities, but their largest trading partners (by province) is the US by a wide margin. You can think of the provinces between the Pacific and Toronto as slightly bluer variants of the states to their immediate south- the ones east of that city are very different from their southern neighbors, though (different demographics, different levels of economic opportunity).
This is why the Eastern Cities need to keep that shared identity strong, or in other words, recognizing that Toronto and Ottawa have the right to rule the land and have your best interests at heart. The Canadian Content rules are their best attempt at this.
Top billionaire elites could have easily pooled their money together to buy it.
No. Only Musk could do it.
Most billionaires aren't actually that rich. They wouldn't be able to come up with enough money.
And of the ones that are, most of them aren't American (and the US would absolutely not let a foreign buyer get their hands on the Voice of America Twitter- Musk is US citizen enough for the government to offload its space program onto his company).
And of the ones that are, most of them work for technology companies that directly compete with Twitter (anti-trust law in the US is a dead letter these days, but if anything could get them to wake up it would be that- Musk isn't that kind of tech billionaire).
The thing that bothers me is that Musk is the only citizen in the US to whom its Constitution meaningfully applies, and has it in ways people meme about. There is a reason it was supposed to be for all citizens and this is it.
He purchased the First Amendment (he owns Twitter).
He purchased the Second Amendment (he owns a private fleet of ICBMs).
He purchased the Fourth Amendment (he owns a functionally-unjammable communications network).
If the country melts down sufficiently to allow a Caesar there's a very good argument to be made that these powers are sufficient to give him a crown.
If that happens, the furries (that also happen to be a good chunk of his staff, though not necessarily intentionally) will have been responsible for putting the Musk dynasty in charge of the entire world and the flag of the future will be a pawprint softly caressing a human face forever.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
The overwhelming majority of mass shooters are not gun people. If they were, we'd expect to see illegal rifles constantly (illegal magazines are a bit more common but even that's not guaranteed) because the anti-gun side is actually correct about short-barreled rifles being more conducive to increased lethality over a handgun without sacrificing much concealability.
But that observation only appears to be correct in theory: illegal rifles and pistols never show up despite all the parts necessary to create one common to every single gun store for the last 10 years (the "braced pistol" thing), and we've never heard of anyone getting stopped because their rifle was poking out of their bag.
What video game logic is this?
If one stops working, only a gun person will actually know how to fix it. Unreliable equipment run incompetently has ended many sprees, and someone doing research on past shootings would know this.
So might as well have one more; it's an extra 10 pounds and a thousand bucks on a credit card you're not planning on paying off anyway. (Come to think of it, I suspect that loadouts of mass shooters are generally dictated by how high their credit card limits are; if you're planning on suicide, why would paying it back be a concern?)
An experienced shooter (who isn't suffering from a brain tumor) would... well, we don't really know what they do because we've yet to see a conclusive example of one committing this kind of crime and most of the time body count comes from "medical attention was delayed because the police failed to breach and clear in a timely fashion". I guess the Vegas shooter counts; medical attention was timely and that body count is what I'd expect from someone competent (though the number and types of weapons used suggests significant incompetence) but we don't know if he just planned to shoot up the concert or if there was something else going on.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
6mo ago
expect the general public to have enough historical literacy to process this with any more finely-grained nuance
This is a cheque the current regime [and the fragment of the public that supports them] is inherently unable to cash. If you want to pretend the evil Nazi menace is everywhere, fine, but that approach has inherent costs, one of which is that you now have to be unimpeachable about not bringing things literally called "Nazis" in.
The public is not going to care (their faction has in large part seen to that) that "he's one of the good ones", even though that's obviously true, and so that faction has no other option but to cancel a military ally from a country they're trying to help because to do otherwise is just writing your own attack ads. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
Personally, I'm rooting for the father; a Communist foreign empire trying to unjustly impose its will on territory that empire considered a western province is not entirely irrelevant to recent Canadian history. Sadly, I don't think there's a Canadian political party willing/representing a public that would be receptive enough to actually pointing that out, but it would be absolutely hilarious if there was.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
8d ago
Pareto. 80% of the improvement in auto safety over the last 40 years comes from seatbelts, first-gen airbags, and crumple zones. The first two were cheap, but the third one was not (if you crash/are crashed into- it's not really more expensive to make a car that accordions if you hit something, but a modern car is more likely to be a total loss from that event).
There isn't much of a difference between survivability of a crash in 2010 (average car on the road has airbags) and 2024 (average car on the road has... more airbags), but the cost of a car has doubled and pedestrians now get killed more often because visibility is the cost of that safety.
Safetyists are demonstrably utility monsters. It's like the car seat thing: massive improvements for a very small cost is fine, marginal improvements for a very large cost are not, and people who are incapable of differentiating between the two because they're stuck on the baseline risk treadmill (exactly like the hedonic treadmill, but for neurotics) will feed literally every scrap of productivity to the machine if they're not slapped down by the people who actually have to pay for it.
Why should I not simply open the gates of the city if I feel that the rule of my external enemy would be less repressive than the enemy that already rules over me?
(Alternately: if the women aren't putting out for me, what would the enemy fucking them change? If I don't fight, I'll probably survive; if the enemy is more enlightened than my culture so much the better for me. The women can defend themselves- they keep asserting they can anyway.)
This is the defining question of what a nation is. The fact that Western societies aren't currently at war with each other (mostly because they're American protectorates, but also because nobody's managed to onshore the resources and manufacturing know-how to be able to credibly threaten their neighbors) is ultimately what has allowed the vast majority of those nations to be consumed by what is, at a population level, husband vs. wife power struggles.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
6mo ago
In the end, it is likely that some arrangement between men and women will be reached.
Yes- this arrangement tends, from the perspective of the man, to begin thus:
"She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."
It is not an accident that Orwell managed to predict what the (emergent) tenor among young-men-as-class-interest would be when set against a small group of older men and a much larger group of young women in permanent bureaucratic control of a post-industrial country. The only reason this prediction is 40 years late is because the socio-economic effects of winning WW2 really did delay 1984 by that much.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1mo ago
if this bill passes
I mean, they do have a majority right now (and it's not like the opposition is any different in this regard). Canada isn't the US; in fact, the entire point of the Westminster system was to make representation more indirect because it makes literally zero difference as to who your local representative is- if political activism is pointless, why waste your time?
I am generally in favour of criminalizing suicide encouragement towards a child
This is progressive-speak for "misgendering", interpreted as such by every court and tribunal, and you know that. Progressive causes such as the usual misandry will get a pass, of course; the entire point of this is to enable progressives to bully your children and criminalize their response even in the event they're ejected from the legislature (and also to make sure it's pan-Canadian, since every other province has been drifting towards the center on that).
It is probably worth noting that we haven't yet seen what a reaction to policy starvation against a Western Canada-based government looks like yet.
Do you think the average male zoomer isn't joining because he feels scorned for being a man?
Yes. This scorn need not be direct; indeed, to coddle a man (and stifle his growth, insulting his dignity as a human being doing) is to scorn him.
"I wouldn't want to get killed for that" mentality
Or to be more precise: "I'm already treated badly enough by society at large; insulted at every turn for existing, oppressed and emasculated by its shitty laws and taxed half to death in the name of some twisted self-serving morality. Why would I ever put my life on the line so that this society might survive given that, if they lost, the culture my enemy would impose on me is actually a better deal?"
Western society is overdrawn on its balance of white feathers.
It's worth remembering that Afghanistan is under Taliban rule today because pre-2021 Afghan society had no white feathers to give. No incentive to join the ANA, no reason to fight for a structure that can't pay well enough, and the society the Americans were trying to build there folded without a shot fired. Whoops, guess you needed men after all.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
10 pounds of loaded mags is massively too valuable to exchange for a second loaded long arm.
To a gun person, yes.
To someone incompetent, I think it's something that, given you know that malfunctions happen but not necessarily why, would mean a second gun (or third, in this case) would sound like a better option.
I'm really just taking the assumption that non-tech people have about computers, or that non-car people have about cars, and applying it: that they're mostly magic black boxes not worth learning the ins and outs of before using one for your task. Tap-rack-bang is absolutely not that hard; neither is asking ChatGPT what to do about Googling an error message.
In all honesty, the criminal just standing there, fumbling about for their extra magazine in their pocket or bag (and the only reason they know they need to reload is because the gun locked open and the trigger's dead) is probably what ends most sprees. By contrast, I wouldn't put good odds on most people if they're up against someone with a fully populated belt liberally dragged through the DAA catalog, even if they're not wearing armor, simply by what wearing that implies.
The 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting involved some silliness regarding a non-standard oversized mag jamming the gun.
Non-gun people just see that 100 is greater than 30. Gun people will claim coffin mags are named that because trusting them to work flawlessly makes it more likely you'll end up in one (the 60 round Surefire and Magpul drum are more reliable than the 100s, and while I don't remember if he had a C-mag or a Surefire 100 I distinctly remember reading it was one of those two).
Just join a shooting group and they'll help.
I don't think that someone who buys a rifle for the sole purpose of committing a mass shooting would have enough patience to make use of a shooting group (either because they're mad now, or because they tend to get booted if they do certain things suggestive of mass shooter-hood).
If this is so, progressives need to come up with some criteria for telling apart the weirdos from the naturals.
Why? They have sufficient power to force you to accept the bad actors wholesale in the first place; that's how the man got his sinecure in the first place. And while I'm very much "equality feels like oppression when you're privileged for so long" to female bad actors claiming "that means you're oppressing women" I can't magically summon guns to enforce that viewpoint.
Anyway, we already know who is and isn't acting in good faith- the test is very simple. (I'm sure the reason I don't see many examples of this is because they're inherently invisible, and not because they make up a vanishing minority of cases.)
If you're wearing unisex clothes, you're in good faith; this is what "dressed as a woman" is for women, so you would naturally do that if you wanted to fit in as one.
Casual dress is not fundamentally that different between men and women and hasn't been for the last 40 years (insert 70s-80s scandals of "women in pants" here), so if it's just "wearing women's clothes" that fixes an assumed fundamental psychological need, that is exactly what I'd expect to see from someone just trying to cope rather than call attention to it (or someone just wearing female undergarments and a properly-fit bra- the latter is required to make the shirts fit right anyway).
The difference when it comes to skirts (the only unisex clothing that men don't currently wear) is fundamentally their transparency; casual and business ones are usually opaque and don't have cuts in them (some of them have more pockets than their jeans), while the ones designed specifically to accentuate one's legs are... neither of those things.
If you're wearing the showier female clothes (in an environment where the real women aren't similarly dressed), you're in bad faith/it's definitely AGP. This is what "dressed as a woman" looks like for men and makes no attempt to change that impression. This generally applies to dresses, the "sexier" skirts, low-cut shirts, those transparent shawl things whose proper name escapes me, etc.- the stuff that you don't see women wearing more generally. Brinton pretty obviously falls into this category, as do all of the most egregious examples.
Now, the obvious counter-claim from someone in these kinds of clothes is that "I'll get constantly misgendered if I'm not in the sluttiest showiest getup I can muster", and the value difference ultimately comes down to "that's a you problem, because a nontrivial number of women have manlier faces than you do and nobody has a problem telling male from female there". The "but I should be wear whatever I want to without other people judging me" is also invalid; I can change the judgment of others by changing my clothes (and have to, when on the clock) and you can too.
It's important to note that this actually can't go the other way (for ex-women exhibiting autoandrophilia) because men have no gendered clothes (men don't wear packers for what should be obvious reasons)- even the part of male undergarments that you can occasionally see have distaff counterparts that look very similar and nobody will question boxers in general despite them being impractical while on one's period since the pads won't fit.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1mo ago
It’s bizarre that 55% oppose non-essential air travel since this class is the most likely to go on overseas holidays, I don’t understand how this works.
You misunderstand; they're against air travel for you, not for them, and open borders against you, not against them (which is part of why the only free trade agreement for migration of skilled labor are non-immigrant visa provisions with 3 countries: Canada, Mexico, and Australia). In the same way, an opposition to private gun rights is not an opposition to the concept of armed private security (including police) outside one's residence.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
9mo ago
the rainbow flag isn't particularly American
The one with the black and brown is extremely American, given that grievance politics about the people who happen to be that color is a unique export from them.
beyond that, japanese creatives apropos manga and anime are the most successful and among the most interesting storytellers in the world
Don't forget video games; the stories contained within their media are probably even more popular than their works of written and televised art.
Music
Nearly everyone on the face of the Earth has heard the compositions of Koji Kondo in some form or another. Sure, you can argue that the reason for that is circumstantial, yet I don't believe any other composer has the same distinction.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Maybe there's an article waiting to be written on that, how political theory feminism has abandoned ordinary women for the sociology department adherents.
Sure, but I don't think I'd have anything more to add about class struggle than the 19th century political writers who put that name on the concept.
Well, except for the gender angle.
God might have initially made the classes "male" and "female", but he also made Stanton Allen, Lynde Bradly, Simon Ingersoll, John Deere, Henry Ford, [the programmer who will be responsible for the neural network that forces as many women out of the workforce as the list of men above did] and, perhaps as impactful as all of those men combined, [the man who will go on to invent the first viable artificial wombs].
So now, we have to go a little deeper... and what we find is that one of those genders is "the one that for all of history is easily replaceable and so is biologically geared to do most of the hard work" and "the one that the former works for because it is not so easily replaced". Or in other words, "labor" and "capital".
And I agree- I think there's an article waiting to be written about the two genders actually being "capital" and "labor", and transgenderism is best defined by what happens when you cross those lines. So if you're a man, you're trying to become the capital-associated valued-for-your-existence gender, and if you're a woman, you're trying to become the labor-associated valued-for-your-actions gender. (Weird how the popular concepts of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' have always pointed at this across every culture, even the matriarchies.)
The upshot is that the labor-to-capital transitioners are useful to capital against labor in ways capital-to-labor transitioners are not (under typical socioeconomic conditions- post-disaster golden ages are an exception to this), which is why it's trans-capital (biological men) getting elevated and why trans-labor (biological women) more often find themselves treated the same way as 'normal' labor is. Sure, trans-labor women don't actively set out to do that, but capital women see it as not only a choice, but a betrayal- after all, they're supposed to be the gender that loots labor, not joins them, and with all the [unfair] advantages they've provided them how could they refuse their offer?
And to top it all off, there's the TERF faction that ignores this dynamic on purpose (they're doomed partially because they did that, and partially because that 'RF' part means they can't get the quantity of labor they need to build capital of their own).
It's also the kind of thing nobody dares write (or research) because it's the kind of thing that makes everyone who reads it get "misgendered" to a degree (I'm pretty sure most women think Ayn Rand is a gender-traitor already... and, well, I rest my case) and also probably doesn't cover all the cases. But then again, this effect is at the population-level so maybe I don't have to.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
3mo ago
But I see no reason why conservative gun owners must force the population of Hawaii to accept a law which both doesn’t affect the gun policy of conservative states and is transparently deeply unpopular there.
This argument conclusively fell through about 1860. One population in a group of states decided that the other population in a different group of states was not allowed to have the laws their electorates broadly supported, so they formed a massive mob and... well, you know the rest.
The compromise (if you can call it that), hashed out as soon the average judge sitting on the Supreme Court had no living memory of that event (they would have been unlikely to have even been born to parents who had participated in it, and even if they did those parents would all have been dead by then), was formalizing this new way. (They would then proceed to give the Federal government everything it wanted- from "anti-war speech is like shouting fire in a crowded theater" to "growing your own crops is interstate commerce"- in the years to come.)
However, because this compromise is couched in the language of "enforcing the constitution", conservatives had a valid point in that incorporation should naturally include the whole thing (not just the parts progressive states like), and 2A happened to get incorporated just as the initial massive Federal government power grabs were passing out of living memory. That probably isn't a coincidence.
All that said, the steelman for incorporation is that it broadly limits how hard a society in a particular State is allowed to entrench its regional brand of corruption/bullshit if the balance of power tilts hard enough one way or the other (so one-party states like California, while powerful, aren't allowed to completely destroy the culture of everyone else unfortunate enough to live there by outright banning and confiscating them). In turn, it also serves as a way to keep State borders stable (i.e. not bisecting California into San Angeles and Greater Nevada) and it's done a good job of that so far.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
And let's make it harder for men to waste their prime fertile years going to college. Get them working good honest blue-collar jobs out of high school, married to their childhood sweetheart, and having babies by the time they're twenty. Economic incentives for men to marry early, father lots of kids, and postpone further education/career-building will surely change the fertility slump!
This is called "conditions that existed in the late 1950s US".
TFR was 3.0.
Teenage pregnancies were at an all-time high.
Graduating high school qualified you for the vast majority of jobs; heck, even passing grade 10 was enough.
People intermingled enough in sufficiently popular third spaces that there probably was someone there for you.
Effective contraceptives existed (the Pill was a late-50s invention).
The truth doesn't actually care whether or not you believe it.
You are as much part of the problem as the women.
Capital gender now has to compete with the wirehead, and labor gender has more freedom (from capital gender- female but empowered by a smaller male fraction) when wearing it. Monthly wage pays rent (or a mortgage), buys food and utilities, and keeps the wirehead running. The fact that the labor gender are sufficiently satisfied by this arrangement to just do it until they're dead may be an inherent problem with the labor gender... but it's a problem only the capital gender can ultimately solve. And being capital, they won't.
(For the record, I think a low TFR is neither unexpected nor undesirable- technology combined with our current social edifice means that very few people are required to run it, and the resultant economic forces are doing the rest. The wireheading and the general hostility of the parties doesn't help, but as TFR in the 20s and 30s was running down close to 2 neither is required for this to happen- not that the first thing women did after getting the franchise in the US was "destroy the most popular male third space", but I'm sure that was a one-off and not indicative of how political interactions between men and women in similar economic circumstances were going to go 100 years down the line.)
If it becomes illegal to be a bad mom or dad
No, I'd say that being a bad mom or dad is actually required by the law. And... uh, it's required already in a good few places with CPS visits for the crime of letting your kids play outside and felony charges for having them walk half a mile, refusing to call them a girl even though they insist they are, etc. Basic 1984 stuff, internalized oppression begins at home after all.
As far as the gun thing goes... private firearms ownership by the 10-18 crowd was higher (and trivial to accomplish, just send the cash in the mail) 60 years ago yet the murder rate (and the rate at which they ran amok) was far lower, and I think the way society treats that crowd now (as opposed to what you were allowed to do in those years) has a lot to do with them deciding to act like this. They used to just bring their guns to school to go hunting afterwards in areas that weren't even that rural, but then again, you treat them more like adults when their biology demands it and you'll see better behavior.
Parents [and by extension, their kids] have been continually losing this battle for the last 40 years (with no indication yet they'll stop losing); it's not a surprise that prospective parents just adopt pets rather than have to fight the State and the demos tooth and nail for the right to parent correctly. Probably worse for the birth rates than the car seat thing, though data on how much isn't exactly easy to come by.
It would have been better had we simply banned daycare when society had the justification to do so in the '80s. But they didn't, so here we are.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns.
Why the fuck are people allowed to use any apps on their work-issued phones, or bring personal devices into sensitive locations? That's what you do when you have real national security concerns, so any concern about this is misplaced. War-gaming military units (and probably some real ones, too) get killed by even indirectly-location-aware dating apps all the time (and that's data China can easily access from American apps).
I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress
Major tech companies buy up every startup that could compete with them to shut them down, utterly fail to come up with a competitive product, mad that China beat them and now possesses the network effect power they tried so hard to build up over the last 20ish years.
News at 11.
that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism
The US already abuses its financial infrastructure to target things its government doesn't like (Operation Choke Point) in both foreign and domestic markets. Sure, they don't directly jam Radio Moscow; but they're more than happy to make sure anyone who makes a radio capable of receiving the band on which they transmit can't get paid. I think that's the same thing in intent and consequence- it's only surprising now because this time it's more overt.
Not because social media is not doing any damage to children
Social media is not doing any damage to children by itself. What it does do is amplify problems inherent to/emergent from how we treat them- so if high school is some highly-age-segregated hellscape where petty bullshit is the only thing that matters in life, social media means that its power structure comes home with you and follows you wherever you go. (This isn't unique to high schoolers; it's also why most people are aware of progressive thought despite not personally knowing anyone who is.)
It's not surprising most people just want to treat the symptom, or confuse the symptom for the root cause. (No shit they're mentally ill; we're actively causing it.) Hard to get someone to understand something when their socioeconomic standing is a reward for not understanding it.
Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them?
Because it's opposition to the concept that they have the legitimate right to change how your kid thinks about gender relations, just like how they freak out when you cut off the transition pipeline for children of non-progressive parents simply because it limits their political power (whether that will work as well as non-progressives think it will is, of course, an open question).
Then why should progressives not shame a father for opposing their child dating an older adult who opened their mind about the beauty of inter-generational sexual relationships etc?
Well, progressives already intentionally conflate men having sex with 5 year old girls with men having sex with 25 year old women, so provided that child is female they already act functionally identically to conservatives in this regard. If the child is male, that's a different story entirely; any negative effects are going to fall on the gender they already actively discriminate against so revealed preferences are that they're perfectly fine with advocating for this (the highest-profile cases of "children celebrated for doing sexually-provocative things" are male).
And... that's kind of the thing, isn't it? People tend to trot out "but that German academic experiment in the '60s proves progressives are pro-pedophilia" but that's a dishonest view of that; what that actually was, if you read the reports, were a bunch of evil women handing over boys (that nobody would miss) with the explicit intention they be raped by other men so they "didn't grow up to be Nazis". Same gender dynamics at play today, same justifications (with the occasional case of this expanding into underclass girls when the rapists pass a paper-bag test i.e. Rotherham).
The liberal counter to this is something seemingly-obvious but nobody ever brings it up for some reason: sexual attraction's a two-way street. "When demands for sex are unilaterally imposed in some way that takes moderate to severe effort to escape, that hurts kids?" That hurts everyone subjected to it, regardless of age or gender for reasons I really shouldn't have to explain. It's worse in this age category, since the number of group-unaffiliated people a kid will ever know is actually really limited, so the overwhelming majority of cases have the degrading "you should sleep with me because if you don't this will make things awkward with your folks/they aren't going to stop me from trying so I'll just constantly badger you about it until you give in" character that women rightfully complain about when it happens to them at work or other social gatherings.
The scenario where little Dan Savage successfully propositions his crossing guard crush, where tweenage self_made_human gets his milf, or any other scenario meaningfully-prefaceable by the words "Dear Penthouse," is arguably not on balance harmful specifically because disengaging from that if things go sideways is costless (which is the underlying assertion classical liberals are making when they claim casual sex is not actually bad, the room temperature for '70s sexual mores, why that view depends on birth control and no incurable STDs, why the double-standard exists between early male and female sexual activity, and why critics of this generally have nothing better than "but casual sex exposes society to dangerous [se]X-rays" as a rebuttal).
This is, as one other poster puts it, "tennis at a kid level", sex as a toy. Most people who manage it at that age, provided they're not lying on the Internet, seem to explain it similarly. No major cost-benefit analyses required, just yes or no. Sex-positive people, most of whom are men, tend to operate this way by default; their goal is to drive the price of sex so low as to inherently make all sex the kind of sex kids already manage with each other. Newlywed couples that are going to be long-term successful generally have this outlook on sex for at least the first couple of years, too.
What I am concerned about is that same kid whose parents intentionally deliver them into the hands of people who will sexually harass them (which was the justification for the original '80s panic about daycare workers, and part of why some people avoid public schools today), tell them they have a duty to give into the [revealed] sexual demands of their caregivers/family friends/family members (including and up to outright rape- usually associated with "Mom's boyfriends" and older stepbrothers), or whose parent tells them it's "stunning and brave" to be doing sexual things with people they'd rather not be in the first place, because that gets right back to the progressive genesis of "you should accept being fucked by people you don't want to be fucked by because man bad muh Nazis".
This is "tennis at an adult level", SaaS sex as a service. This is primarily cost-benefit (if the sex is pleasant is less relevant), be that for money, social status, social justice, retaining a significant other, friend, or other relationship, not being beaten, sleeping out in the rain tonight, or killed; or all of the above at the same time. Sex-negative people, most of whom are women, tend to operate this way by default; because they believe all sex is adult sex, their goal is to drive the price of sex so high that selling it once to a single man will set them up for life (this also squares with their assertions that women sleeping around doesn't devalue the sex they eventually plan to sell in this way, but most women aren't taking this to its logical conclusion).
(Which also properly explains how the feminist claim of "all sex is rape" is motte-and-bailey: the motte is that all sex is inherently of this type, and the bailey is that it's abusive that tops men don't just give bottoms women whatever resources they want for free. The claim of "sex work is real work" is the mirror image of this.)
But the modes of thought about this are important if any non-progressive actually wants to coherently unpack why what progressives are doing- which is the crime of imposing adult outlooks and an undue importance on sex onto people that genuinely shouldn't have to deal with that- is abuse. For the liberals, yes, you do have to accept the entire argument about sexual liberation; the traditionalists should probably keep in mind that this is why Biblical gender dynamics are the way that they are in the first place and re-emphasize that the entire point of getting married in the first place is that that is the best chance of having a relationship for which these dynamics no longer apply (even though they still do, it's a slower burn, at least).
Are The Kids Alright?
Yes.
As always, the problem is idiot parents (who are either too close to the problem or don't quite Get It) and adult in general with either a motivated or unmotivated case of Last Thursdayism where they are either forgetting on purpose, or unwilling to acknowledge, that they ever were a kid in the first place (they sprang out of the womb fully-formed at [age of majority + 7]).
You can see this effect on absolute full blast in the other thread this week if you know where to look. In fact, it's in the sibling comment to this one and most of the replies will be missing the point entirely: kids are on their phones 24/7 because, to a large extent, there is literally nothing else for them to do, and the people who will continue to comment on that thread are all young enough to know that. Thus the amnesia is either literal or motivated, which was the conclusion I distinctly remember coming to when I was a kid myself: social conditions haven't changed.
Anywhere from hyper-preferences for everything to be done via text/e-mail, to literally falling silent in in-person meetings because of inability to cope with (what I think is) base-line social anxiety (what I mean here is the general sense of awkwardness we all feel the first time we meet someone new).
The pathway to this is sublimely simple:
-
Pathologize/criminalize/trivialize any trait, like doing things for yourself, facing any sort of risk, etc.
-
Kids get the message, don't take any risks, don't do anything for themselves
-
Kids fail to develop that skill in the critical window
-
Adults now complaining kids can't do thing you intentionally prohibited them from doing
-
Clearly, it's not safe for them to do anything else -> look how incapable they are -> we need to protect them for their own good
-
Go to 1
And yes, in case you were wondering, this is how racism leads to a downwards spiral of capability in the affected group. The effects are functionally identical- the group acts exactly like you've incentivized them and taught them to.
But hey, we can justify it to ourselves by saying "well, they'll grow out of it and magically become adults once it is Safe (25)". I'm sure that is a great plan and won't backfire horribly- of course, moral hazard being what it is around every generation that succeeds yours, you'll never truly be held accountable for the pieces you cut off your kids so they'd be Safe. And besides, they'll find yet another way to fuck up the next generation anyway, so who can truly say?
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
5mo ago
as less people are having children society seems to have also become less accommodating of having children
American society is 50/50 on things like "12 year olds shouldn't be permitted outside the home unsupervised". 100 years ago, they'd be walking home from their jobs; clearly, modern children are defective and deserve how we treat them.
So that's the room temperature. It is not a surprise any adult would refuse to make themselves vulnerable- to subject themselves and their kids to an increasingly insane society, one where one's neighbors (and their collective corporate arm, called "government and bureaucracy") have basically totalitarian control should they deign to exercise it.
Just like a mass shooting, when you get the news of one kid arrested off their front lawn for the crime of existing in a place they had a right to be, you impose an utterly massive outsized chilling effect on everyone else.
Same thing with the Satanic Panic, which I'd argue should be more properly seen as a coup d'etat, where the matriarchy bureaucracy would proceed to depose and replace the patriarchy meritocracy that came before. Anyone having children after that time does not know peace from the mostly-invisible civil war; any child does not know what came before nor are they encouraged, nay, permitted to develop into a proper adult until the time for development has long passed (and their growth and standards permanently stunted as a result).
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
is that while statistically white people are very slightly less likely to carry out shootings than their proportion of the population would suggest
This is actually really fucking interesting, because it suggests that whatever makes a mass shooter affects all men in equal measure rather than general criminality. I can't even begin to speculate about why that is, but someone should probably study it.
Is the 4chan meme that 2d girls better than 3d true?
Drawn/animated pornography is super-stimulus, but not only does it make the anatomically-impossible commonplace (dickgirls, extreme body sizes, vore, breasts larger than those occasionally found on Ontario shop teachers, being able to emit more bodily fluid over the course of one act than anyone does over their entire lifetime), it also generally manages to make those things aesthetically pleasing, too.
It also obviates a problem some kinds of people have with porn where "it's degrading and violating to the people in it". No people? No problem.
Asian search terms have an insane dominance; "teen" is mysteriously absent from the entire page, even though it has to be among the most common searches.
"Asian" and "Japanese" are good proxies for "teen" generally because of this. It's a stereotype for a reason; the high-pitched squeaking and school uniforms aren't really doing the heavy lifting.
This is more a "take stock of one's blessings" post than anything else, but other than what everyone else has already covered:
More options
Context Copy link