TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
I don't believe that Tolkien generally has female characters campaigning with men. My impression is that outside of a few extreme outliers such as Galadriel, women in Tolkien's works are mainly apt to fight only when left undefended, such as when their men are away at war, or perhaps in a situation where defeat means annihilation of their people anyway.
Definitely don't get the impression that Tolkien's works are full of girlboss fighters who run around being warriors most of the time. Rather, like reality, they contain a few outlier women who are somewhat capable of standing their ground in desperate moments, but would really prefer not to unless absolutely necessary.
It helps to remember that the movies changed this up a bit; a lot of Arwen's badassery in the movie was actually Glorfindel in the books.
Luthien's an odd case to be sure, and I've never been quite sure what to make of her as a character. In any case she's definitely an extreme outlier.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
just make it legal for veterinarians to treat consenting humans. Give them immunity for malpractice for anything below gross negligence -- if you want to get a million dollar payout by convincing a jury that a doctor treated you wrong, you should have gone to a hooman hospital.
This idea is absurd and I love it even though I can't imagine what second and third-order effects it would have.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
It really does surprise me that we don't see more people snap and retaliate directly. Presumably the demographics most likely to do that are also the ones most likely to get free healthcare in the first place.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
Yes, extremely, though he is also very busy.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
That's just normies being bad at decoupling.
I don't really see much to engage with here; your assertions are packaged in such a way as to discourage careful consideration and it would probably be helpful for you to clearly articulate a thesis.
For example,
We have seen deliberate attempts to smudge together all vaccines into one monolithic product and doctrine.
Just don't know what to make of this. That sounds kinda like something I could believe, but it's vague enough that I can't exactly go find out more or argue, can I? Except to say that I'm not sure I have seen that, no. Perhaps someone will demonstrate it at some point, in which case I'll likely adopt the position and also be upset about the matter.
Also you seem to be a single-issue poster which indicates crankery in general. Leaves me less interested in investing in understanding whatever it is you're trying to say.
TitaniumButterfly
23d ago
Thanks, TIL
TitaniumButterfly
29d ago
I think it arose because Capital demanded that it arise.
TitaniumButterfly
29d ago
I'd rather have seen a section from Aristophanes' Assemblywomen if we were doing this.
TitaniumButterfly
30d ago
Solid point and I accept it, though in this case my reasoning is more that "Once those problems are solved we'll be back in a position to deal with the others." It's a sort of faith in my heritage.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
And so we're back around to the subject of the OP.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Honestly never heard of him. But he has short stories which are enticing as a sample. Really I'd like more good apostolic Christian sci fi.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
The way I remember it, having been there and very leftist at the time, was a lot of the people around me saying we must vote for Obama because he is black and it's time to stop electing white men; that regardless of how one feels about him personally, the importance of electing a black man is paramount for other reasons.
If a primary movement has racial under and in this case overtones, it's not a surprise that the backlash does as well.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
What word would you like me to use to describe someone who believes that politicians are importing brown people to replace the white race, and all the attendant beliefs that normally swirl around that one?
Nationalist
What word would you like me to describe someone who thinks that Trump should have power to do X, Y and Z regardless of their legality without resorting to what you see as slurs?
Authoritarian nationalist
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Banned one hour for use of emojis.
I'm emoji-prone myself but think this is probably a correct standard for this site. Did it become official at some point?
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Just for clarification, I'm reading this as 'doesn't intend to impose costs...'
Yeah, I think that's probably true. Happens all the time, but not with that conscious intent.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
For this reason women are also responsible for the vast majority of accidents. They're generally-worse drivers. Men just happen to be specifically worse in the one category which also generates the highest-value damage.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Not interested in engaging here but I did want to compliment your excellent use of 'farrago.'
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
There's a goldilocks zone between "obnoxiously poisoned by leftism" and "Randian libertarian blowhard" in SciFi.
...I haven't exactly found it yet, but it has to be there.
Heinlein's cocktail of beliefs is at least bizarre enough to be more entertaining than irritating.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Again I'd like to point out that the author's proposal is to simply repeal antidiscrimination laws pertaining to sex, which is a much more reasonable objective than dispensing with smartphones, the relevance of which I can't figure out regardless.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I don't recognize the latter name so couldn't say. But again there's a lot of Branson I didn't read so I wouldn't be shocked if I missed or just forgot about the age of consent angle, which... is interesting to think about, I guess, but never productive to discuss ime. So I'd have pretty much screened it out anyway.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Oh, was that Julius Branson of Powerology fame? I didn't associate age of consent stuff with him but then I didn't read most of what he wrote. He did show up on a mutual discord server for a while though.
I am confused whether she thinks merit is a separate quality from masculinity.
She thinks they're highly-correlated in practice, in traditionally-male fields.
E.g. could you have lots of extremely talented women who get a job on merit but then, by their fundamentally feminine traits and preferences, ruin the workplace nonetheless?
No, because part of 'merit' here is 'not acting in typically-feminine ways which ruin the workplace.'
Or are merit and maleness the same thing to her, in which case you could safely allow a whole bunch of very 'male'-leaning women like her into a workplace, as long as you vetted them carefully?
No, not the same thing, but in that case you wouldn't actually need to vet them very carefully. It would simply become the de facto understanding that the workplaces will operate along masculine lines, as they used to when women started entering the workforce. Women would understand this and either self-select out or at least understand that they are to comply with such standards of behavior or face disciplinary action.
I think in the latter scenario she can probably unhypocritically keep her job, it's just she'll also have to adopt a notion of merit that is divorced from ability to directly perform a job function, and is instead all about degree of fit to a male workplace culture.
No. Implicit in her take is that male workplace culture is itself more meritorious and will naturally outcompete female workplace culture.
So that's her take as I understand it.
Personally I'm not convinced. I don't think it's so easy to just 'treat women like men'. We're biologically hardwired to treat women differently and it's upsetting to almost everyone when women are held to male standards.
As a business owner myself, I prefer to assign female employees to accounts that I expect will go poorly. This is because if I send a man and things go poorly we're fired. If I send a woman and things go poorly "We love her, she's great" and "She works so hard" and "Yeah she's making steady progress, we'll get you more funding." Great stuff as a business owner. You can be sure that even if the regulations were dropped I'd keep hiring women!
It does cause me to reflect upon my own hiring standards. From my perspective the only way for a business, such as the one I describe taking advantage of above, to protect itself would be to demand that I send a man instead of a woman in the first place. Admitting a woman to the position at all is implicitly admitting several potential time-bombs. Presumably this works back around to implying that the value of female labor is inherently somewhat lower even with most else being equal. Interesting.
Anyway the author makes a great moderate case and I'd be happy to see us moving toward her policy proposals.
I'm in favor of the move, all things considered.
Star Trek is not a human future. It's a fictional scenario constructed to serve as the vehicle for the political assertions of people laboring under any number of ridiculous misapprehensions about human nature. Humans would have to be substantially modified in all sorts of ways to make that work, and I think we'd lose much of what I value about humans in the process.
Dune looks like a human future full of people living human lives. Most of the 'bad' things in the books are straightforwardly contrived for plot purposes. I think Dune would be a good future. Caladan seems nice. And I don't think most of the Landsraad would actually put up with the Harkonnens except for, again, contrived Imperial support.
But, in such cases, the question one ought to ask is what ruler one is even using to measure 'good' and 'bad'. And if it turns out one's answer is 'the social consensus prevalent when I was young' one is due to have a bad time in short order.
What actually matters to you in the future? What patterns are worthy of preservation and propagation?
I really think the barrier to people accepting this (obviously correct) perspective is that while there are many, many, many important things that men can generally do better than women, there's almost nothing that women can do better than men except that it has to do with bearing and raising children. In which case they do shine!
But people notice this and fundamentally flinch away from the idea, because our entire generation has been raised to hate it and find it low-status.
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