This place is right-wing twitter (insert "always has been" meme) but verbose and you're not allowed to call stuff gay or retarded. Accept that and you'll have more fun.
EDIT: Come on guys, you know it's true. Don't shoot the messenger.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention
Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.
This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.
Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.
To_Mandalay
2mo ago
Well basically I either don't care about or actively dislike conservative values and therefore don't want to live according to those values and don't want them to be those according to which society is shaped. I think it's pretty simple. Does that mean I hate conservatives? Not on a personal level.
To_Mandalay
1mo ago
It's silly for right-wingers to be like "can you BELIEVE these insane leftists saying fitness is a gateway to the far-right?" when "fitness is a gateway to the far-right" is the whole schtick of guys like BAP, and I say this as someone who lifts weights 3-4 times a week. On that note, I haven't noticed myself turning into any sort of right-winger as I get stronger. But for me it's not a hobby, it's a chore that I do purely out of vanity, not because I enjoy the activity itself at all.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
To_Mandalay
1mo ago
Okay, but it's undeniable (and why would they want to deny it anyway?) that the fitness 'aesthetic' is a very integral part of a certain type of online right-wing politics and fitness influencers/youtubers/etc. tend to lean right.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.
I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more?
No.
Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.
I don't think so, I think for most of history it has been the standard belief of most men that women are an inferior order.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Horses are better than humans at running but the number of people throughout history who would disagree with the statement "horses are inferior to human beings" is very small.
To_Mandalay
2mo ago
It seems like the rapid economic advancement of East Asia is an argument against hard racial hereditarianism. Because the HBD arguments goes that Sub-Saharan Africa is poor, underdeveloped, and wartorn because black Africans are just have bad genes. But if we grant the HBD premise that EAsians are, for genetic reasons, more intelligent than whites, blacks, American Indians, Arabs, etc. then it becomes clear that a people with high "genetic potential" can spend centuries mired in poverty, before some environmental stimulus induces rapid development. Because prior to the mid-point of the century, many EAsian countries were as poor or poorer than many SSA and Latin American countries. Someone in the 19th or early 20th century who claimed EAsian poverty was for genetic reasons would have been on as solid footing a someone who claimed the same of SSA poverty today, but he would have been wrong.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
If life expectancy is plateauing
Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau, at least until LEV.
if people are getting fatter
This is pretty straightforward. In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and manual labor is less necessary than ever. Why would people not be getting fatter.
and more depressed
As noted in the OP, if this is a real phenomenon, it appears to be localized to the US, and not present in other countries that have experienced modernity.
if murder rates are rising
Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020.
It's not actually clear that everything is getting worse.
Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining.
Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure (that's actually a myth but you get the point). The world then is almost certainly not going to look or be configured remotely as it is now.
There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility.
For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.
To_Mandalay
9mo ago
I've lived in the southwest and as far as I can tell the 90s - early 2000s scaremongering about how mestizos would turn the US into a gang-war ridden nightmare and possibly embark on mass murder of whites has simply failed to materialize. There are counties on the US-Mexican border where hispanics are already a huge majority and they aren't much like Brazil. Brownsville, Texas, the most hispanic city in America, has a homicide rate on par with some of the lily whitest states in New England and the midwest.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Funny note about Sanning. He recently released a new edition of his book with a postscript.
I’ll post links when I get home but in the postscript he engages in his usual numerical wizardry to try and get the numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe as low as possible. He quotes an American report on displaced persons in post-war Europe like this:
“Some 500,000 [Jews] were in the American zone by summer 1946”
If you actually check his source, it is specifically noted that the “500,000” number refers to displaced persons in general, and one page later it is clarified that only about 70,000 are Jews, so Sanning is just lying about his source. This sort of thing pops up constantly in revisionist literature.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
I know it's ackshually dulia but if you don't assume Catholic doctrine is true, from an anthropological perspective Mary clearly occupies the role of a goddess in the religion.
To_Mandalay
11d ago
Somebody could easily hold that a homophobic, misogynist, Islamist party ruling Gaza is a preferable to Gaza being wiped off the face of the earth.
To_Mandalay
11d ago
They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.
Very few if any leftists have expressed support for Hamas' political, religious, and social program while also being pro LGBT+ which would actually be contradictory. A portion of them will express support for Hamas insofar as they fight the IDF without supporting their social program, which is a consistent position. A greater part of them will refuse to say either way, because they view calls to condemn Hamas as bad-faith attempts at distraction (the standard line being "I'll condemn Hamas when my government sends them billions of dollars").
Entirely from the correctness or incorrectness of the political views themselves, there's no real contradiction between "I support LGBT+/feminism/whatever" and "I am against Israel's actions in Gaza."
To_Mandalay
26d ago
When I said "Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp with gas chambers," I did not mean "no one or any document claimed gassings at Dachau," since I mentioned that at least one (Blaha) did. I meant that murder by gassings at Dachau were not part of any official charges against anyone, and no Dachau guard was ever accused of or executed for gassing prisoners, nor did any ever admit to it. Likewise, there were no "hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings," assuming that by 'killings' you mean 'gassings.' There was a single eyewitness who claimed one small-scale gassing at Dachau. It is not comparable to a place like Treblinka, where every single eyewitness, wither victim or perpetrator, was in accord that it was an extermination facility, and where every guard who ever spoke on the matter admitted to the fact.
To_Mandalay
3mo ago
It's pretty typical of the mainstream historical method, too: ignore the thousands of WVHA documents dealing with the administration of the prisoner labor force, which did not regard them as slaves (and they were paid for their labor)
Nazis burned down Polish/Ukrainian villages and marched people onto trains at gunpoint to be sent to the Reich to work but at least they got paid in worthless money.
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe insofar as the Soviets conducted slave raids across Europe, but nobody says the latter because the only real purpose of the former is to draw distinctions that don't actually exist
Yes the Soviets also made extensive use of slave labor and Stalin was also a bad guy.
My point was that just because the Israelis have no plans to use Palestinians for forced labor does not mean their proposals to expel the Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula cannot be compared to German plans for the resettlement of Jews.
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is quite horrible and still isn’t half as horrible Nazi treatment of the European Jews.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
In the modern developed world we've mostly but not entirely gotten rid of non-state tyrannies. In the past, I think it would be appropriate to refer to a slaveholder or a the head of a clan as a tyrant over his subjects.
To_Mandalay
7mo 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
9mo ago
There are millions of unemployed men in America and very few of them are homeless.
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
More options
Context Copy link