To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It really is not that hard to make babies.
Apparently it is.
Natural selection is making room for the ones that can figure it out.
Most of the high fertility subgroups are subsidized by larger, less fertile society. Color me skeptical of the 'Amish/Haredim will inherit the earth' scenarios.
If you're not reproducing the future state of humanity is not really your business.
I'm a sperm donor, so I'll have some descendants running around.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
On the other hand we still have subgroups that maintain above replacement fertility, and they tend to not be the ones that leaned into the sexual revolution.
Falling fertility seems to go hand in hand with both technological development and political/social liberalization. It's possible that only one is responsible for the effect, but since they almost never occur independently, it's hard to tell. If we all collectively decided to adopt the material and social circumstances of 19th century Russian peasants maybe we could get fertility rates back up, but this is exactly my problem with the "modernity is terrible because fertility rates are falling" argument. It is apparently the case that pre-modern society was able to reproduce itself, but I and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing. As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction. Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence, though obviously the first would be better.
If they're dropped from all of sociology, we can dismiss them when discussing the sexual revolution as well, but not before.
I don't want to defend all or even most of sociology.
If it was improving the condition of women, it's a failure, women (and men but nobody cares) have higher rates of mental illness and report being unhappy at higher rates.
I don't think transgenerational rates of self-reported happiness or mental illness are particularly reliable measurements, for a number of reasons. Someone in the 30s probably wouldn't even think to diagnose themselves with 'anxiety' or 'OCD' while someone in 2023 with the very same symptoms would. As for happiness, it's not obvious that this is measurement invariant. To use an extreme example, if you asked a medieval peasant and a 20th century accountant to rate their happiness on a scale of 1 - 10, and the peasant said '6' and the accountant said '5,' this is very weak evidence at best that the accountant would be happier living the life of the peasant.
Even if you take such measures at face value, Western Europe has not seen similar decreases in self-reported happiness and life satisfaction as the USA, despite undergoing the same and in some cases even more extensive liberalization of sexual mores. This is also true for suicide rates, which have been steadily dropping in Europe for decades as they've risen in the US. Unless Americans are uniquely susceptible to the negative effects of the SR, it's mostly something else.
The institution of no-fault divorce seems to have resulted in a large drop in female suicide rates and domestic violence. That's a pretty clear case of improving the condition of women.
If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.
Even granting young people having less sex is a bad thing (weren't people complaining about teen STD and pregnancy rates forever?), this trend seems to have started abruptly in the 90s, so blaming it on the SR is dubious unless you can demonstrate some kind of delayed-trigger mechanism.
If it was simplifying relationships between the sexes, it's a failure. It got things so bad people are reinventing inferior and more primitive norms to what we had before.
I'm unsure what you're referring to here. What is so complicated about relationships today?
Marriage as an institution is destroyed. The family as a stable unit to raise children is in tatters.
I disagree these are bad things. There's nothing actually preventing anyone who wants to from getting married. Most of the poor outcomes of children of single mothers (income, education, crime, etc.) don't manifest in the children of widows, so the much-touted disastrous impacts of raising a child outside of a two-parent home seem to be mostly down to confounding.
And birth rates are cratering
Birth rates have been cratering since way before the sexual revolution.
Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom.
A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope
Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no' because 'I have depression' was not something that would have even crossed most people's minds, even if they displayed the same symptoms as someone who was 'diagnosed' with depression today, but would they have been popping SSRIs if they were available and socially acceptable? Does the question even make sense? Like I said in another comment, I don't really put a lot of stock into downward trends of positive answers to questions like "are you happy?" over time, because I doubt the invariance of the measurement. People were different in the past, even in very basic psychological ways. Someone then saying "I'm happy" and someone now saying "I'm not" doesn't imply the modern would be happier with the life of the premodern. Even if people are significantly more miserable today than the historical average, the sexual revolution is hardly the only thing that's changed in the past few decades. There's a huge inflection point in rates of self-reported anxiety and depression right at 2012 when social media exploded.
Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.
We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.
On a purely personal and selfish level having to marry a girl and raise seven kids sounds nightmarish and I am endlessly thankful that the technological and social change of the past century means I don't have to do that.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
What's your understanding of "the sexual revolution"?
The broad cultural shift of the 1960s and 70s which led to the institution of no-fault divorce, the rise in divorce rates and fall in marriage rates, the removal or at least weakening of the expectation that everyone would get married and have children, the destigmatization of illegitimate children and promiscuity, the increasing acceptance of non-traditional forms of sexual expression such as homosexuality and transgenderism, the general decoupling of sexual activity from procreation, and the increasing prominence of women in the workforce, among other things.
For a conservative, obviously these are bad things in and of themselves, but surely "the outcome of the sexual revolution was disagreeable to conservatives" is an uninteresting fact since that was clear from the start, and no one ever expected it would not be. So "the sexual revolution failed" must mean "the sexual revolution failed on its own terms."
It's certainly not clear to me, anecdotally, drawing from my own life experiences, that these changes were a failure or bad things, very much the opposite. So I would need a larger, data-driven argument to convince me.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Going by your logic, the gospels had a vested interest in blaming the Romans for Jesus' death at the time they were written. Before then, nearly all Christians were Jewish, to the point that Christianity was seen as a Jewish religion.
This opens another debate of when the gospels were written. I don't think Mark was written earlier than the 60s, and the rest of the gospels between then and the first decades of the 2nd century. The primarily Jewish era of the church does not seem to have lasted very long, as it did not make much headway among the Jews. It was certainly over by AD 70 and the destruction of Jerusalem.
then surely they would also have been willing to remove anything about Herod's reign.
If the gospel authors are trying to redirect blame from the Romans to the Jews, why would they remove details of Herod's reign?
There were plenty of Jewish Christians around who would notice if their religion's main focus suddenly changed.
The main focus of the early Christian belief is that Jesus died "for our sins" and was raised. Who killed him and why, while not immaterial, is of secondary importance I think. Furthermore, the early years of a new religious movement are often when it undergoes the most extensive doctrinal developments, before calcifying. You can see this in the much-better documented example of Mormonism in the 19th century.
Whether the Sanhedrin held the weapons in their hands is immaterial.
If Jesus was stoned by Jews then it would be obvious he was killed for some crime under Jewish law, and there wouldn't be any debate at all. The fact that he was crucified instead, unlike his brother James or Stephen, is what makes it interesting.
Based on other sources though it sounds like he was explicitly a rebel in other ways as well, including leading armed forces.
I'm pretty sure Theudas is only mentioned in Josephus and Acts, and neither refers to him leading an armed revolt.
What a way to word this! You strongly imply that he was sentenced to be stoned, which is not what happened at all. He was being tried when he angered the Sanhedrin so much they stoned him as a mob.
My point isn't that it was legal, but that they evidently didn't have much of a problem doing it one way or the other, and I don't think there's any indication anybody got in trouble with the Romans for killing Stephen, nor for any of the other stonings mentioned in the NT.
The main point is that what Jesus was doing (calling himself 'king' and preaching the imminent downfall of the gentile powers) was enough to get him crucified on its own, so him having Jewish enemies who also wanted him dead is almost besides the point. If all the Jews loved Jesus, would the Romans not have killed him? Actually they probably would have killed him even sooner.
This was 100 years later, long before what you describe as "the first and only actual top-down, concerted, empire-wide push to persecute and stamp out Christians qua Christians.
Pliny was a regional governor, and the Emperor even advises him in the answer to his letter to try any Christians who are brought before him, but not to expend any energy actually hunting them down. I say it doesn't seem like Pliny knows much about them because he describes their rituals/customs as if he's unfamiliar, and says he actually tortured two deaconesses to find out more, but only discovered "depraved superstition." What I meant was that Diocletian's edict was the only time in Roman history where the Emperor apparently said "we're getting rid of all the Christians in the empire," and empire-wide steps were taken to enforce this. Even the Neronian persecution appears to have been an attempt by Nero to take the heat off of himself rather than a principled attempt to uproot the whole faith. Before this, persecution was mostly sporadic and on the initiative of local mobs and magistrates. While most of the Church fathers were (if you take traditions at face value) eventually martyred, most of them apparently lived and preached openly as Christians for many years before they crossed the wrong governor or priest. There wasn't a "shoot on sight" order.
They do go back to eyewitnesses though. The two Marys are mentioned by name.
What I mean is nowhere except in the gospels, except at the end of John, is there anything like "I was told this by X son of Y," or even (with no specific names attached) "I know this because I saw myself" or "I know this because I spoke to those who were there" which was extremely common in ancient biographies, whenever the author actually had access to eyewitness sources.
I don't think the resurrection narrative in particular necessarily has contradictions at all between the books.
Matthew has the first post-resurrection appearance to the disciples take place on a mountain in Galilee, while Luke tells us that the first appearances were in Jerusalem, and what's more leaves little room for Galilean appearances by having Jesus explicitly tell the disciples (in the first chapter of Acts) that they are not to leave Jerusalem until Pentecost, to name one of the biggest differences. The differences can be reconciled with some work, like all differences, but I don't find the harmonizations compelling.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
We know Jesus was executed for insurrection due to the Bible
Jesus’ death by crucifixion is also recorded by several Jewish and pagan authorities, some quite early (Josephus and Tacitus).
Guessing at what you think the most likely alternate hypothesis is--it's common knowledge that Jesus was executed for insurrection, but the authors of the Bible constructed an alternate story where that was just a legal pretext?
The gospels have a vested interest in placing as much of the guilt for Jesus’ death onto the Jews rather than the Romans, especially as the church became overwhelmingly gentile in ethnic composition.
Also, all of those people actually ran rebellions, complete with military action.
At least one recorded rebel (I think “the Egyptian”) seems to have only claimed he was going to replicate Joshua’s miracle of splitting the Jordan. His followers came out into the desert to watch, and they were all massacred by Roman cavalry.
I find this highly unlikely--the Bible basically says nothing at all about independence from the Romans. I think anyone likely to know Jesus was executed for insurrection, and need an explanation for that, would also have some inkling that he actually was a rebel if that was what he was.
I don’t think Jesus ACTUALLY led a military revolt against Rome, though that’s what IMO he probably thought that’s what he was doing.
To elaborate, the Bible DOES talk about independence from Rome, though obviously not in those terms. The whole point of Jesus’ ministry is the imminent consummation of history, and the need to repent before judgment. It’s all over the gospels and Paul’s letters, the ‘Day of the Lord’ where God is finally going to destroy/subject the nations and vindicate Israel/God’s people. Obviously, this meant the destruction of Rome, which was the great gentile power. To see the ubiquity of this expectation see also Revelation, which is entirely a screed promising the imminent divine judgment of the great city that sits on seven hills and rules over the kings of the earth and is drunk with the blood of saints (who could that be?) According to Matthew, Jesus also said that he was going to be made king after this divine intervention, and that his disciples were going to “sit on twelve thrones” with him. So Jesus was going around preaching the imminent downfall of Rome/the nations and calling himself a king. He apparently didn’t mean for this to come about by him and his followers attacking Roman soldiers with iron swords; he was going to let the Heavenly armies do the work for him. But Pilate probably wouldn’t have bothered to make the distinction.
by your logic, Jesus' Jewish enemies did want him dead.
Sure, but they’re not the ones who actually killed him.
They couldn't stone him--capital punishment was restricted to the Romans.
In Acts Stephen is tried before the Sanhedrin and then taken out and stoned. There’s no reason the same could not have been done to Jesus.
This is early Christianity, citing someone by name would mean threatening their life.
The idea that early Christians were huddling in attics hiding from the secret police is not really accurate. For the first few decades of the church's existence there's not much evidence the Romans particularly cared what Christians were doing, or that they were even much on the radar. Even 100 years later, Pliny the Younger barely knows what Christians are and has to write a letter to the Emperor asking what should be done about some in his jurisdiction. The first and only actual top-down, concerted, empire-wide push to persecute and stamp out Christians qua Christians didn't come until Dicoletian, almost three hundred years later. Early persecution was more like "you won't shut up about Jesus outside the temple of Apollo so finally a mob beats you to death." There wasn't like a Roman Gestapo in charge of scrutinizing obscure Christian documents looking for the names of potential dissidents to arrest.
don't think irreconcilable differences are incompatible with eyewitness accounts--these were written possibly decades after the fact and people may simply misremember the details.
I think there are reasons the resurrection narratives probably don't go back to eyewitnesses but at a certain point, if the details aren't reliable, then all that can be recovered is the core fact that at some point, some person or persons claimed to have experienced some kind of vision of Jesus after his death, which I don't find very compelling.
I can't trust it though, because when you talk about stuff I know anything about it seems obviously wrong to me.
I don't think I've said anything particularly "trust me bro" - ish. It's easily verifiable for example that Matthew has nativity and resurrection narratives and Mark doesn't.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
What I said was that there were many insurrectionists and few were crucified; this is compatible with the claim that they were crucified all the time. The point is that only a small proportion were crucified.
First century Palestine is not especially well-recorded, but even so a number of rebel leaders are known (Judas the Galilean and his sons, Simon son of Giora, Theudas, “The Egyptian,”). All of them were killed by the Romans, though they weren’t all crucified.
The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?
I don’t read Koine Greek but my understanding is that the word usually translated as “thief” is more like “bandit,” and it has a political connotation. Crucifixion was not normally a punishment meted out for run of the mill robbery or even murder, but generally for sedition or treason. Barabbas, who is part of the same ‘batch’ of prisoners slated for crucifixion before his pardon, is explicitly identified as being one of a group of rebels arrested for having participated in “the uprising”
The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him. It's not like those puppets are literal puppets--they were still Jews, chosen for (among other things) their ability to lead other Jews.
If Jesus’ Jewish enemies had wanted him dead for breaking some Jewish law, they could have disposed of him on their own terms, whether through stoning or just whipping up a lynch mob. There would have been no need to get the Romans involved. The fact that he was crucified at all suggests the primary instigators of his execution were the Romans, regardless of whether or not a lot of Jews also wanted him dead (I’m sure they did) and that the main reason for his death was that he was perceived as having committed some anti-Roman act. Claiming to be the son of some obscure regional deity, or even the deity himself, was not, but claiming to be a king would have been.
Many think Matthew was written before Mark and Mark copied Matthew; others think they both copied some other Gospel.
Markan priority is about as established as anything in the field. I can’t call to mind any currently active scholar, even in the most conservative institutions, who hold that Mark is dependent on Matthew. There may be two or three. I do know there are a lot of Bible-believing, Nicene affirming, “Jesus-is-the-only-way,” even inerrantist, conservative scholars who still won’t defend Matthean priority, which IMO says something in itself.
In almost every instance of a deliberate difference between Mark and Matthew, the change is one that would make a lot of sense for Matthew to add to Mark, but none the other way around. For example, it makes a lot of sense that Matthew would add birth and resurrection narratives to Mark, which lacks them, but it’s hard to see why Mark world cut them out of Matthew.
It doesn’t make any sense that Matthew, an eyewitness, would copy most of his gospel from a second-hand source (including, again, the story of Matthew’s call, surely the most important moment of his life). Cross-checking a thing or two, sure. Copying most of it wholesale? Highly unlikely.
The internal anonymity of the gospel of Matthew is also a problem. Ancient authors rarely failed to cite firsthand knowledge of the events at hand if they had it (why would you?), but nowhere in the gospel does the author even claim eyewitness status.
John appears to be an eyewitness account,
John is the only gospel for which I think one could, in principle make an argument for eyewitness testimony.
Mark and Luke are based on eyewitness accounts
I doubt it, primarily for the reason that neither bothers to cite the eyewitnesses they consulted by name, which there would be little reason not to do. There are also significant and (in my view) irreconcilable differences in the narratives, particularly in the resurrection narratives, the most important part of the story, which precludes them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events.
Matthew appears to be an eyewitness account.
I doubt it, for the reasons above.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
There were many insurrectionists; few were put to death.
That’s not true. The Romans crucified rebels all the time. They crucified two right next to Jesus. Jesus would not have been crucified if the Romans didn’t want him dead, because the Romans were the power in Judea. The Sanhedrin were handpicked puppets.
I wouldn't say this is "very clear" at all
Huge swathes of Matthew are copied word for word from Mark.
Also, "a few people were not eyewitnesses" is not exactly a very strong counterargument for "there were eyewitness accounts."
If the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then we have no eyewitness accounts.
I find it funny that you focused on this rather than "There are no contradictions in the Bible" which is so much easier to counter.
I didn’t address this precisely because I didn’t think it was with addressing. Yes there are a lot of contradictions in the Bible, but arguing about them is usually fruitless.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I do love an opportunity to relive my atheist debater glory days.
He was put to death not because he performed miracles but because he made this claim.
Jesus was put to death as an insurrectionist against Rome. This is why the sign over his head said "King of the Jews" and not "son of God."
Jesus Christ fulfilled many prophesies written by people hundreds of years before he lived.
According to the books written by his followers, yes. In a lot of places you can see how the Gospel authors are working overtime to fit prophecy to reality, like Matthew's story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on both a colt and a donkey, to fit the prophecy of Zechariah. Or the two very different nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. And a lot of the supposed prophecies fulfilled by Jesus aren't even prophecies, like Psalm 22.
are verifiable by eyewitness accounts
Even by Christian tradition, neither Luke nor Mark was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, or resurrection of Jesus. Matthew was very clearly not written by the Apostle Matthew, since it plagiarizes about 90% of its content from the Gospel of Mark (a non-eyewitness), including and most inexplicably, the story of Matthew's own call to be Jesus' disciple.
Jesus Christ rose from the dead—he was observed by over 500 people over a 40 day period after his resurrection.
Paul refers, in an offhanded comment in 1 Corinthians, to an episode which is elaborated upon nowhere else in Paul's writings, nor elsewhere in the early Christian canon, in which the risen Christ was supposedly seen by 500 people at once. No details are presented, nor does any account of this appearance exist. It's no more convincing than that video from like 2010 where a crowd in Alabama believed they'd seen a leprechaun. Actually less so, because there's video evidence of the leprechaun crowd. The resurrection narratives in the gospels contradict with other on a number of points which makes their historicity doubtful at best.
His empty tomb was first discovered by women—not the most credible source in ancient times if you wanted to fabricate a story.
IMO the empty tomb story is probably a later fiction. "Translation fables" in which bodies went missing from tombs were extremely common in the Mediterranean literature of the time. It was a literary shorthand to indicate that a righteous person had been assumed to heaven and been deified. It would be special pleading to assert these other contemporary stories are false but the story in the gospels is true.
We know that he died because the Roman soldiers punctured his side and drew blood after the crucifixion
I feel like I'm back in 2012 just typing out the words, "you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible," but...it's true. Yes, this is what happened according to a story in the gospel of John, and the reliability of the gospels is the issue in question.
What jumps out the most about this substack piece is the writer's remarkably over-inflated sense of self-importance. This ad may very well have fallen on deaf ears (or maybe it didn't, idk. Like someone else pointed out, it came out a week ago), but his evidence for that is that it was mocked on dissident RW twitter, which does not exactly have its finger on the pulse of American public opinion, or even American right-wing public opinion. Later he claims that Assadist gas attacks were an attempt by "the regime" to manufacture consent for, I guess an invasion of Syria (?), but that this was narrowly thwarted only by anons on twitter and 4chan ("weaponized autism").
As a sidenote, the author takes a bunch of jabs at the "official" 9/11 story over the course of his article, pretty clearly indicating he believes it was a US government op done with the help of the Mossad ("dancing Israelis" etc.) I haven't looked particularly deeply into 9/11 conspiracies but I've never understood what was supposed to be so ridiculous about passports being recovered from the crash sites. The official story is that three out of nineteen hijackers' passports were found semi-intact, two of them in Shanksville, where one would expect the recovery of onboard items to be significantly easier than at WTC or the Pentagon, since it was an empty field with nothing else around.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
All of the major social democratic parties in Europe were explicitly Marxist for a long time. A different interpretation of Marxist from the Bolsheviks, but still Marxist.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Calling the British Labour party a "Marxist" party is stretching the word absurdly far.
Labour was an explicitly socialist party for decades. The plank calling for the socialization of industry/property was only removed, I think in the 80s or 90s. The communists didn't think they were hardcore enough and wanted violent revolution now, but that doesn't change the party's ideals in its early years. This was even more true of the Second International parties on the continent like the SPD, the SFIO, and especially the PSOE. Do you deny those parties were very popular with the working classes of their respective countries?
I said "marxism" not "communism" and explicitly identified both the social democratic and comintern-affiliated communist parties, because it's true that the latter alone never commanded a majority of working class support in European countries. Though they still did pretty good. The PCF got 15% of the vote in national elections France in 1936 (calling the red belt 'a single region' underrates it. It was the French equivalent of communists dominating the US industrial regions in the great lakes in the 50s). The KPD got 17% of the vote in Germany in 1932, especially from unemployed workers.
The mining and industrial regions in the northern UK have been called the Red Wall because they consistently voted Labour for so long, until within the past decade.
There's also the similar 'Red Belt' in France, centered around the former heavy industry heart of the country, which voted for a long time not only socialist, but communist.
Wedding, the one-time working class slum of Berlin was known as 'Red Wedding' in the interwar years, because it was a communist stronghold.
In Spain, in 1934, several thousand socialist-communist miners stormed the city of Oviedo, torched a bunch of churches, shot a dozen priests, declared a 'soviet republic,' and fought the army for two weeks to protest the entry of a right-wing party into the government.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The Marxist parties (communist and social democratic together) commanded a solid majority of working class support in most European countries up through the middle of the 20th century.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
This doesn't really account for Marxism being extremely popular with manual laborers in Europe for decades.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It probably did have a major impact. America became substantially more feminist during the 1800s -- coverture was ended, the first states had already granted woman's suffrage. By 1918 Mencken was already complaining in his In Defense of Women that women had legally seized the upper-hand. Robert Dabney wrote in 1871 about northern conservatives caving on womens rights. In 1886, Henry Adams was satirizing feminism in Boston.
All of these datapoints are from the late 19th - early 20th centuries, and falling birth rates go back to the 18th century.
Here is an interesting article making the argument that birth rates dropped earliest in the regions that were first hit by englightenment/feminist values, notably: France and New England.
The suggestion that pre-revolutionary France was a substantially more secular society than England is dubious at best, and the article doesn't even try to argue that. Censorship of anti-religious and free-thinking literature was far less stringent in England, and religious pluralism far more advanced.
Granting that feminism is entirely or mostly responsible for declining birthrates, and since you apparently define "feminism" as the extension of any legal or civil rights whatsoever to women, what was so great about the mid-eighteenth century that it's worth returning half the human species to the status of property to restore?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Putin has passed laws restricting the promotion of "non-traditional family arrangements", down-graded criminal penalties for domestic abuse, and allocated money to the rebuilding and refurbishing of Orthodox churches and cathedrals. He may not have put through every trad dream policy, but he is obviously making more of an effort to restore traditional arrangements than any western leader.
Yes, that is what I said very clearly my original post that I linked to. There is no control group.
So why should anyone take seriously the thesis that feminism is responsible for X bad thing in modern society, if there's no way to test it? Even if I granted that society is worse on net today than it was in the 1950s, Feminism is far from the only thing that's changed since then.
These are things that were the norm in America 70-120 years ago, such policy changes are what it would actually mean to roll-back feminism.
120 years ago, in 1900, the American birthrate had already been halved since 1800. Was that also feminism's fault?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
If there's no correlation between outcomes and degrees of feminism today on the international scale, then there's no reason anyone should take seriously the argument that feminism is responsible for worsening social conditions, because you won't admit to any control. The only control is the world 100+ years ago, and life back then was worse on every metric I can think of.
Countries are feminist in different ways.
What is your definition of feminism?
He made a show but he did not actually do much of anything.
This is like marxists who insist the reason USSR/China/Cuba/etc. failed to create a communist utopia is because they just didn't do communism hard enough. Maybe. But since there appears to be no correlation between communist policy and improved outcomes, there's no reason to believe that. Same here.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Whether they're extremely feminist by historical standards doesn't matter. If feminism (or social liberalism in general) is what causes worse social outcomes, then more feminist/liberal countries should do worse than less feminist/liberal countries now. What are the metrics by which ROK is more feminist than the US or western Europe? Quick googling shows lower female representation in parliament, significantly lower representation in corporate boardrooms and leadership, about equivalent divorce, labor force participation, and college education rates (ROK's are a little lower for all). Abortion was illegal until two years ago.
Your post where you propose to cherry-pick a counter-narrative which makes ROK out to be a feminist hellhole is sourced entirely from reddit comments.
For example, South Korea ranked 10th in the world in the UN's Gender Inequality Index
Also ranked below multiple western European countries, none of which have any of these problems in nearly the same degree as ROK does.
In any case, the OP is about gay marriage, not feminism. Homosexuality remains much less socially accepted in ROK than in the west, and there is no gay marriage.
Russia is a particularly good example since, as you note in this post, Putin's government has made a big show of retvrning to tradition, revitalizing the Orthodox Church, and opposing the degenerate west, and yet he can't keep the fertility rate from continuing to crash or the kids from becoming atheist.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
"Social alienation" is harder to pin down and define, but crashing fertility and growing irreligiosity are a lot more clear-cut. But in any case, the Japanese "loneliness epidemic" seems comparable to the similar decline in community in the west.
including declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness
All of these problems exist, and in fact are even worse, in countries like South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The right isn't always the more interventionist side. During WWII, the left (with caveats) was more in favor of intervention on the side of the Allies than the right. The dynamic where the right always wants to go to war abroad and the left doesn't is mostly an artifact of the Cold War, where the enemy was the communist USSR, which obviously the right had specific reason to oppose. Isolationism can easily be justified on right-wing terms, i.e, not our problem, let's keep our own house in order.
Putin is also, ostensibly at least, the leader of a white, Christian, conservative country. This doesn't make most American right-wingers like him (most definitely don't), but a small fraction does. A couple years ago memes about based manly Putin vs weak sissy Obama were not entirely uncommon from conservative facebook boomer types.
I've always had kind of a niggling, I guess atavistic drive to propagate my genetics and would feel sort of guilty about terminating my 'line', which is why I jumped through all the hoops to donate (well that and the payment). But no I have no interest in raising kids.
We could probably just pay people to raise them in Brave New World style barracks or something honestly.
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