Tree
12d ago
It seems like this was purely (if it had been more successful) intended to try to provoke a nuclear response.
Isn’t there a more parsimonious explanation for ukraine’s behaviour? Something like: ‘Let’s do as much damage to russian military equipment as possible, because, we’re in a war, and that’s what you do’.
The russian supporters ever-renewed surprise and outrage at being attacked back never fails to entertain. Why would the ukrainians do that? They must have ulterior motives. Yesterday on twitter the hallucinated reason was to ‘torpedo the peace talks’, the peace talks that, until then, putin had shown zero interest in, and they duly decried as absurd.
Tree
12d ago
That’s you though. You don’t have a consistent liberal position, you think a father’s main responsibility is to ensure his daughter’s eternal chastity.
Try to look past the whoring, and she seems perfectly nice. Top drawer, actually. If parents could mass produce aellas instead of the bush league kids they currently turn out, the world would be a richer, happier, more interesting place.
Tree
13d ago
It’s completely fine. I agree with the rationalist critique that people should be quicker to change their mind and habits, when they find a seemingly good idea, which is what she did. It’s absurd to accuse her of conformism (“vulnerable to suggestion”) .
'The most valuable things about me are my tits'?
She didn’t say that, and there’s nothing wrong with being valued for your tits, or your abs, or your yellow hair.
Only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
Tree
13d ago
Also your characterizing Aella simply as a "sexually liberated woman" seems off here. Something something motte and bailey.
That is the point. It’s supposed to be a dilemma. The conservative tends to favour an education similar to aella’s, but detests what she has become (“damaged”). The liberal otoh detests aella’s education (“abuse”), yet finds she ended up fine (”sexually liberated”) .
So the lesson is: do the opposite, like George (not you). Every instinct they have, was proven wrong.
As to my own opinion, I don't think she's damaged, because for one, she doesn't think she's damaged. She also seems to have a pleasant undamaged personality, not bitter, mean or aggressive.
And I don't think parenting matters much, so that's how I escape my own dilemma.
Tree
13d ago
Ah I may as well simp to the end.
Aella really likes being valued more for her innate characteristics than for accomplishments she has to work hard for
I don’t think that’s fair. Who doesn’t value being young and attractive? She merely wants to advertise and enjoy all the advantages and opportunities being young and attractive confers upon her, without being slowed down by old rules no one really understands, and the self-interest of less desirable rivals.
Why can’t you be valued for both, innate characteristics and accomplishments (innate consciousness, ha) ?
Tree
13d ago
So would a less restrictive, less religious childhood, combined with sexual liberation, be less damaging then? If not, what does your theory predict? Everything, based on anything?
If her parents were blue tribe perverts who raped her and beat her and she grew up without a father, would that not be easier for you to explain? And even easier for your worldview, if aella was more of a trainwreck than she is. I think this is part of the reason why so many conservative people complain about her (and ‘have never been interested in finding out more about this woman’), because for all her whoring she doesn’t seem all that damaged. Weird for sure, but not more than other rationalists.
Tree
13d ago
After “aella is dumb, because child aella was afraid of pain”, OP chimes in with “aella is lazy and superficial, because child aella cried after being publicly embarassed”. After these two unflattering bits of psychoanalysis (by two women), you lament the “male obsessive fawning“ over her.
This doesn't change my mind about her--it is, in fact, exactly what I might have expected had I ever given it much thought.
Is it, though? Would you say: religious conservative upbringing leads to damaged girls?
Or perhaps: abusive parenting leads to sexually liberated women?
But someone’s worldview must be in shambles, and maybe all.
Tree
13d ago
Yeah that's also my read, but it remains confusing, and the hypocrisy accusations don't help, since there's hypocrisy everywhere and all the way down. I guess arjin means james lindsay (who is the main anti-("woke-right") figure) who dislikes trump and tucker for being post-truth populists, may have also condemned greenwald, using his recently exposed sexual proclivities?
Tree
14d ago
It may be slightly delusional, but I am confident everyone is just incompetent and I could do parenting in like one fifth of the regular time. Modern parents are like those people who are constantly in credit card debt. Just spend less … time on your kids.
Mothers should stop nursing early. Put the kids in a progressively bigger cage while you do other stuff. Then you let them in the garden, and after that you give them a key so they've reached their last cage-level, and voila, you go to their graduation, fire off a "well done, son/daughter" and you're free.
Fundamentally all the time and money invested in them beyond the absolute basic minimum has no influence on their outcomes. Could even make them worse: neurotic and coddled, or suicidal like koreans from education.
Tree
15d ago
There's really no need to apologize. Or agree with me on divorce or anything else.
Although… if I had to continue the meta-discussion, I’d say that agreeing with someone, like an apology, is giving them a status boost, and disagreeing a status hit, and is even often seen as a direct attack; here again all the status implications are polluting the search for truth… but I’ll stop. You meant to be nice, and for that I thank you.
On advice of counsel I invoke my privilege against summary opinion dismissal and respectfully decline to answer your inquiry. Presumably, the personal experience of being a divorcee would make one bitter and lacking in objectivity, too emotionally invested in the subject, and therefore wrong. But is this really the case?
To take another example, let’s say I gave my opinion on parenting, or education, in favour of homeschooling, or against authoritarian parenting. Someone will come and ask me if I have children, again as an implied criticism, to dismiss the opinion of the childless man. But unlike the divorcee, in that case, it is the lack of personal experience, the lack of emotional involvement and lack of subjectivity, that makes him wrong. Opposite causes, same effect.
So it is not epistemic hygiene and concern for the truth that makes these opinions worth dismissing. What then? Status. It is lower status to be divorced and childless. So the dismissal based on personal circumstances pretends to be a method of searching for the truth, but is really about the status games we all play, pushing some people down, getting to a higher rank.
I don’t mean this as a harsh criticism of you, as if I’m responding to an offense: ‘you just made an enemy for life, buddy.’. For all I know, your comment comes from a place of 100% pure empathy, goodness and the search for truth, justice and the american way, you seem like a friendly guy. It’s just a thought, idle speculation.
Tree
16d ago
Nothin‘ wrong with that face. Although I wouldn’t push it to the limit, vegan-BMI-wise. The only person I know who died of natural causes before reaching thirty, was a cousin’s girlfriend, a sports-obssessed thin vegan, heart attack. I may be over-using that anecdote to justify my erring on the overweight side, but it’s still true.
Tree
16d ago
Implied obligation, uh-hu. So if the housewife cheats, she should be financially left in the cold, right? She did not fulfill her implied obligation of fidelity. Or if she wants to leave with the pool-boy, same, she should be financially punished for rug-pulling the contract like her husband is if he cancels.
If (for instance) a woman interrupts or gives up a career while married, whatever you think about who has is 'hardest', that is very obviously done on the understanding that this loss in current and future earnings is fine because the man will continue to earn.
That is not obvious at all. It’s a pro-moocher perspective.
To put gender out of it, let’s say my gay lover was a doctor or a banker, and I lived idly at his mansion, drove his porsche, and occasionally walked his dog. It would be ludicrous for me to pretend that my lazy ass ‘gave up my earnings’ on the understanding that his income will support me in the future. If the relationship ended, far from demanding he hand over his assets , I would thank him for letting me use his stuff while we were together, and be on my way. It is not some great sacrifice to not work, it is a privilege.
If you don't like those obligations, don't get married.
People don’t like them, and they are not getting married. The obligations are not fixed in stone. If we made them better and fairer, people may get married more, and hate each other less.
Tree
16d ago
You're a progressive, Harold. Why would you want to punish people for adultery?
I think alimony is a completely outdated concept. There is no reason to award it ever. The solution to the problem of the law encouraging women to mooch off men (and alimony is only a small part of that) is not to make it easier for men to mooch off women.
Tree
16d ago
Are you limiting your dating pool to vegans/people who care about the environment and such things? And with the running and biking and swimming and bean-eating, are you maybe too thin, do you have like a veganface ?
It is a strange idea to have an exclusive sexual relationship without sex, or at least future plans for sex. Don’t kids call it just friends, no benefits? Although now that I think about it, I know one old guy who stayed with a woman for eight years, in his twenties, and he wasn’t getting any either, ever (this bothered him a lot, and mind, no one involved was religious, or ugly). The relationship ended when he first met his girlfriend’s sister, who had sex with him that very night. So at least you got off early.
Tree
17d ago
That is only a convention. Society has retained features of ancestral marriage that benefit women and jettisoned the rest. They come from a time where housewives would bring far more economic benefit into the marriage (a dowry, tending the chickens etc) .
What if I said: “get bent woman, it’s my money, you did not work for it. You never had full ownership of my assets, only the usufruct, and that limited right lapsed with the divorce.” Obviously the courts would disagree. But their opinion is not a law of nature.
Women are only so eager to get married, and then divorced, (and men reluctant) because our laws give them huge financial benefits for doing so. We have structured society so that the ideal, most high-paying career for a woman, is marrying a rich man. And then we wonder why they are not in STEM and contributing to society as much as men.
Tree
18d ago
Right to spousal support started because, in the ideal world of "women do not work outside the home", once divorced a woman had little to no chance of income of her own.
God forbid any woman would find herself in financial difficulty and would have to earn a living, like any man ever.
"The idle parent" shows your lack of comprehension of how a household works.
Single guys spend maybe 2 hours a week on household chores. When they move in with a woman the weekly dose per household goes to 16 hours, without any kids. Most of the housework done by women is busywork, deadweight loss. They tidy and clean in circles, and if that’s not enough waste, they remodel. They brush the slabs outside, where people walk, and want the roof power-washed, where no one ever goes.
Funny, I thought the entire point of the rant about women was that men very much would give a shit if their wife fucked another man, and if she dressed like a slut. Or if she left her nice hardworking ordinary guy husband for a bad boy who looked cool but was trashy.
We’re not all the same, with the same rants, you know. I accept that adults can fuck who they want, as our legislation says, and I want that rule applied fairly.
You seem to have a great deal of hostility towards another woman, based on her appearance. I’ll put it down as a data point in favour of slut-shaming being mostly intrasexual competition.
Tree
18d ago
Your preferred religious morality rules are not applied fairly. Are you in a position to punish women financially for adultery like you think cheating men deserve? No. Because the system officially runs on very different principles (egalitarian & sexually permissive) that aren’t applied fairly either.
Partly because guys like you refuse to apply the same censure to women as you do to men, women get to pick which sort of marriage they’re in at any given time for maximal advantage.
Tree
18d ago
She put a few stamps on early orders, that must entitle her to half the future earnings of the man who created and worked all his life as CEO of that company. I think not.
We live in a time where every wife feels like an “equal-value partner” in their husband’s business, and the laws we made agree with them. But they are not.
(which, again, were easily avoidable by those men).
I understand it's always the man's fault and he always has to pay. If he cheats, well he got what he deserved. If she cheats, he failed to nurture a woman's love, he didn't treat her right, and you wouldn't want to slut shame a woman anyway, and besides, she 'contributed' to the marriage, so here's the bill again.
At every level of society, at every age, women get more than they put in. Starting at university, where they have been 56/44 for decades despite working far less, through marriage, divorce, and pensions, where they live longer after having contributed less. And the more we hand over to them, the more oppressed they feel.
Tree
18d ago
Men have no reason to dislike sluts, on the contrary. It’s women. Like OP, women want the sexually promiscuous of their own sex, and I quote, ‘culled’. So that now perhaps, their dream partner, deprived of rival options, will turn to them, on their terms.
The women and their priest (religion, and Christianity in particular, being a woman’s game, with women’s ethics) always rail against the town bike. But most men secretly love the slut, as you recognize. And no wonder, because how can one love someone who gives seldom, and grudgingly? Men’s tragedy is there aren’t enough bikes to go around.
The fallen woman who pays the ultimate price? Yeah it’s common, but it’s part of the silly trope where the writer really wants to tell a mundane story that happened to him, he’s two-third done and fears he has nothing left to say, so to make it seem more important, give it some oomph and end it with a bang, Mr. or Mrs. Smith dies at the end for some ill-explained reason. It’s death out of a machine. And look at that, it's the end, and there's a death, just like in real life, death is the end. They all sit back and wait for the nobel after that flash of genius.
Tree
18d ago
I appreciate the attempt. I guess we just disagree on the charitability threshold, specifically the distinction between being wrong and lying. Of course I agree that the woke problem is not limited to 3% of Harvard’s output, but being wrong on this, and making a few flippant tweets, does not make hanania a bad faith actor.
And “Avoiding mentioning” is not a crime sufficient to establish mens rea. I also think Darwin should have been treated more charitably, so there you go.
If you could, why would you not spend a few million to inflict hundreds of millions in damage to the enemy?
I suppose the smart, the russian-soviet way to spend money and lives, is to use AA missiles to shoot down cheap drones, or to kill one of their guys in exchange for one of Ukraine's, so that russia can brute-force its way to victory and its population to extinction. Much more sporting.
Well yeah, your plan is ugly and weakens ukraine's position, as you note. This plan was beautiful and gave russia a black eye. Apples and Oranges.
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