ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
Maybe it was the weather, but that night I found her very alluring.
User ID: 812
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
9hr ago
Did you read the "manifesto"? There was clearly much wrong with this person beyond anything to do with being trans
This has always been the case, as with all other shooters. But this rhetorical charity is never extended to incels as a group. Just look at the hysteria "Adolescence" kicked off. A fictional 13yo boy fictionally killed his fictional classmate and everyone was acting like there was an actual irl pandemic of manosphere incels murdering your daughters, but statistically violence against women has been trending down over the years.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1d ago
Related, a recent Finnish paper studied youth mental health after gender reassignment surgery, they found that psychiatric morbidity worsens significantly post-surgery. This comes to the surprise of absolutely no one. I'm sure even many LGBT affirming liberals are extremely skeptical of the 1% regret rate claim, but quietly nod along fearing political exile. Transsexuals are earmarked the most social capital out of any grievance group in the woke hierarchy. Incels rank at the bottom, they're socially acceptable targets, completely toothless, you can go nuclear on their sense of self-worth (or lack thereof) without consequence because they won't leave their basements. Simultaneously, they're the biggest threat facing society (women) in 2026. Schrodinger them away!
Slightly less related: China is apparently cracking down its LGBT scene even in Chengdu.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1d ago
Still no significant movement on the maritime trackers. Ships are still grouped at the anchorages on both sides of the Strait. But Trump says Iran is working with the US to remove them. If Trump offers sanctions reliefs and ends the US blockade (which I doubt) in exchange for giving up their nuclear program and ceasing support for proxies against Israel, maybe this war could end quickly and we can return to pre-war status quo by the end of the year.
This is as close to a win-win situation as we can get. For Israel, there's a weaker defeated Iran in the region without means to develop nuclear weapons quickly, and for Iran, they get to survive and have access to sustenance funds. Trump can also claim some victory points for his base.
All of this is of course assuming Trump is being truthful and wants to end the war that he started. There's so much we don't understand or know behind the scenes.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1d ago
You're right, they probably do genuinely believe it. But I think that's marginally better than being dishonest with your own intellect and staying in the bandwagon out of fear of getting kicked out. You can make a far stronger case for States' rights being the leading cause of the Civil War, but no reputable journal will ever publish it. You'll only see them arguing against it, while allowing far more methodologically flawed papers arguing for woman the hunter. I just think, absent any social/career cost of offending progressives, academics will more readily reject these narratives offhand. Instead, it's pick the wokest answer and write backwards, basically.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1d ago
Yeah I don't miss leaving X at all. That title comes across as a withering backhanded slap at a tyrant's delusions of divine grandeur, I literally can't read any adulation there. Hot takes and one-note emotionally charged short-form communication have killed people's reading comprehension like tiktok has killed the youth's attention spans. This is why I abandoned my own joo-poasting, took me too long to realise I was insulting my own intelligence.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
2d ago
Which is that by and large, their daughters seem to have little problem dating white guys and in many cases actually prefer white guys over men from their own race.
Really? South Asian female spaces frequently complain about lack of interest from non-South Asian men relative to East/Southeast Asian women. And while they're probably doing better than the guys, dating =/= marriage, which is an important distinction. Actual intermarriage rates are the lowest out of all Asian American groups, across both sexes.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
2d ago
People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.
You nailed one of my least favourite trends in the Israel/Palestine discourse. I've personally flirted with the Zionist conspiracy bandwagon myself but even in my Joo-poasting arc, I could not read any article from "Jewish" mainstream media and come off thinking the IDF are the good guys. The examples they usually cite of this supposed pro-Israeli bias are occasional word choice hedges (“clashes,” “alleged strikes,” contextualising rocket fire as “response to…”) or instructing reporters to avoid terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. But to me, that feels less like propaganda and more like the cautious house style of an establishment outlet that doesn't swallow the full activist catechism. The tone is still predominantly grim Palestinian suffering, orphaned children, power imbalance and skepticism of Israeli explanations for strikes. So is the real charge that these papers are not maximally pro-Palestine and anti-Israel enough? On the other side of the spectrum, pro-Israelis believe that progressive media is inherently biased against "apartheid" Israel and won't take everything their government says at face value, while purchasing the "Hamas narrative" with far less scrutiny.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
2d ago
I had an Australian Indian friend. His dad went to one of the best universities in India via scholarship, moved to Australia and is among the top rated neurosurgeons in the entire country. Absolute narcissist though. Verbally and physically abused his son to a point where his mom (who was abusive herself) took him and his sister away. The sister was adored by both their parents, turned out fine, got an arranged marriage and moved to Singapore where she recently had a son. My friend seemed like he didn't fall far from the tree when we were growing up but... he sorta turned out okay. Above average intelligence, normal job, okay social life, level headed. Unsure about his dating life though.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
2d ago
In short, your ingroup oppression points and achievements are positively correlated. One woman's achievements are treated as collective credit for all women. And women get to hijack men's inventions by claiming female erasure, an ironic which systematically hinges on male erasure.
that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did
IMO woke history revisionism is one of the most damaging trends in modern academia, simply because of how much it is allowed to proliferate uncritically or even treated with any seriousness. It usually manifests in the systematic downplaying (or outright denial) of slavery, human sacrifice and other endemic practices among non white civilisations, and claiming that white men somehow introduced these vices to their otherwise harmonious civilisations.
There's also a recurring theme in progressive history circles to claim the Americas would've still evolved to become the modern superpower that it is today had European settlers never arrived on these shores, as if leaving the indigenous peoples entirely undisturbed would have produced equivalent institutional, scientific, and industrial outcomes. Even though historical and even current parameters do not support this claim.
I doubt even they believe this though, but saying it out loud would get them exiled by their ingroup as it would be implying that atrocities (real or perceived) against indigenous Americans was justified as it had led to more productive outcomes.
While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women)
I'll be honest, that show radicalised me far more than "Andrew Tate" could ever hope to.
UK's statistics show a downward trend of violence against women over the years, a pattern that's remained consistent throughout Andrew Tate's influencer period. So even if we generously allow the dubious "correlation = causation" logic, empirical facts point in the opposite direction of the show's premise.
I'm overgeneralising, but progressives are consistently inviting allegations that facts and figures function as their worst kryptonite. The irony is compounded by the real world assault charges against the actor who played the black detective.
And for a production that lampoons boomers for their lack of tech literacy, the show itself mirrors the very species of reflexive (and completely unfounded) moral panic stoked by suburban karens over violent video games in the 2000s.
The actual crime is young white men's perceived departure from progressive politics, but that is not enough to cause alarm. You need to engineer a moral hysteria that your 13yo sons are gonna murder your daughters. But really, you're streisand effecting stuff like this. Progressives seem to have forgotten what teenagers are like. They push boundaries, they don't care what it is but if it's a sacred cow to the adults, they will push those buttons. Perhaps they thought bible thumpers would be the butt of the jokes forever and cannot fathom being seen as the out of touch scrooges themselves.
They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.
Yet we're told that men are the ones being radicalised! Women's concerns are a failure of society and men, but men's concerns are a failure of men.
Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bend over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen.
And yet, young able bodied men continue to disproportionately shoulder physically intensive and dangerous vocations that sustain modern infrastructure - the grid, roads, energy, built environment. Men still account for >90% of all occupational fatalities. Male labour remains foundational to the physical backborn of the modern world. Yet, the culture allows anti-male messaging to proliferate without consequence, while framing women's minimal participation in these fields not as a reflection of preferences or average physical differences, but as society's failure to accommodate them. Collective male guilt for crimes committed by men is axiomatic, but collective male credit for dangerous, essential labour carried out by men is never acknowledged.
And despite this, we are not allowed to write stories about male heroism without extensive ideological throat clearing to accomodate girl power mandates. Women are encouraged to retrofit male oriented media (movies that they don't watch and video games that they don't play) with feminist themes, to atone for the arbitrary crime of pandering to male power fantasies and featuring female character designs that appeal to straight men. Frank discussion of men's distinctive struggles is permissible only when prefaced by deference to feminist priors.
Times are a-changing. White guilt petered out with the George Floyd riots, the "Holocaust industry" ran out out of steam with the Gaza war, the "misogyny industry" is next. Acknowledging men's unique qualities and contributions, and extending reciprocal respect, is unlikely to leave women worse off. Quite the contrary, in fact.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
3d ago
Not even trying the least to beat the dogpill allegations.
Nor the "redpill" allegations. She knows that he doesn't share her values, she believes he's lounged off his wealthy (allegedly) straight white male privilege all his life, so what made her choose to be with him? Just what about him is worth overlooking his politics for, which she claims is alarming her?
This tracks with the pattern I've seen irl, literally the worst men I know (deadbeats, drug users, serial cheaters, emotionally distant dbags, Andrew Tate followers) who treat their girlfriends like fleshlights face near zero barriers to attracting women. You can't keep wielding the social crime of "misogyny" as a conversational cudgel to stop people from noticing unflattering* patterns in female attraction and dating incentives.
*I personally don't think it's unflattering, but it's probably difficult to reconcile it with progressive sacred cows.
I'll tell you this much, if you (and especially the missus) find WKW's movies boring or unrelatable, that's probably a good thing. It's a good sign you're happy where you are and your relationship/marriage is healthy.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
4d ago
Yup. Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
4d ago
Zhao Luisi of the current generation, and Michelle Reis (the girl on my pfp) are my favourites.
Just look up any dancing e-girls on douyin. Obviously they use many layers of plastic and filters, but it gives you an idea.
Side note: China's tiktok brainrot is really no better than ours!
Isn't Saudi thought to have access to pakistan's nukes on demand?
This is more hedging than operational reality. The formal text is intentionally vague, because Pakistan's arsenal was always India focused with tight command controls. Actually handing over warheads would likely trigger many political, technical, and NPT headaches that make the whole operation look more like signaling than a ready-to-go umbrella. Also Pakistan is literally on Iran's doorstep. Allowing the Saudis access to their arsenal to explicitly counter Iran might prompt a military response from Iran and support for proxies in Balochistan. And Pakistan doesn't want that obviously.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
5d ago
Jumping off that thread, I read Nadhim Zahawi's article making a case for this war. Some highlights:
The reality on the ground inside Iran was stark. By mid-2025 Iran was assessed to have had nearly a thousand pounds of 60 per cent enriched uranium. This is so close to weapons grade, that American intelligence said that the Iranians could have fuel for a bomb in under a week. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it could make enough for nine weapons. They were likely days, not years, from the bomb.
Now, picture what would have happened if they had actually crossed that line. A nuclear Iran doesn’t just get a weapon. It gets a shield. The IRGC and the Houthis could control the Strait of Hormuz (as well as the less often discussed Bab-el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Eritrea, connecting the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden), and forever dictate terms to ships with infinitely more certainty than their threats today are armed with. Hezbollah operates with nuclear cover. The Gulf states face a simple choice: bow or build their own bombs; Saudi Arabia has already said it would. A nuclear cascade across the most volatile region on Earth would follow.
Worst of all, the conflict we have just seen to defang the regime suddenly becomes impossible. This is exactly why the ayatollahs wanted nuclear weapons in the first place. Then the axis of resistance, led by China and Russia, can hold the region to ransom and make any Western intervention in Ukraine, Taiwan or elsewhere even more difficult. Suddenly, short-term oil price hikes don’t seem so existential.
So how did we nearly let it happen? Tehran executed a brilliant strategy, with extraordinary patience, over two decades. The ayatollahs pursued a deliberate multi-track approach: building a regional proxy network of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, to name but a few, that made the cost of confrontation appear unbearable.
Then a stroke of unforgivable Western naïveté – Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This gave the Islamic Republic both international legitimacy and billions in sanctions relief, while tying Western hands. The JCPOA deliberately excluded both the missile programme and Tehran’s regional behaviour. Many of us warned at the time that Iran would use the breathing space to fund proxy operations and accelerate ballistic missile development. That is exactly what happened.
So when we assess the conflict, which is likely far from over despite the ceasefire, we should consider not just the way it was carried out, or the consequences of action. We must consider the counterfactual of inaction. And we should rebuild a British foreign policy landscape that is capable of considering the different outcomes and the impact that they might have on the British national interest.
What would be the effect on our energy security, our trade and investments – and above all the safety of our people – if this intervention, or indeed any other, had not happened?
This hinges on the premise that a war with Iran was a matter of when, not if.
FWIW 400+ kg of 60% enriched uranium is hard to justify for civilian use (feel free to correct me), so the only thing this write up convincingly argues is Iran was definitely building a bomb. But I see no evidence that they were mere days away from a deliverable warhead. What about pit fabrication, warhead integration, missile delivery, and testing? Re Houthis, there is no historical incidence where other nuclear powers (say, Pakistan) offered nuclear cover to their proxies. And given that Saudi Arabia lacks Iran's enrichment infrastructure, a nuclear Gulf is how many years away after a nuclear Iran?
Notwithstanding @Shakes intemperate declarations of an ever secure victory under President Trump, I want to believe that paying NZ$80 for half a tank of fuel is a small price to pay for less savory alternatives but none of it makes sense unfortunately.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
6d ago
Can I just point out that 21 hours seems too short for negotiations? I don't think the talks were done in earnest, at all. The 150-page JCPOA took almost 2 years of frivolous negotiations and lasted just as long. A 21 hour session in the middle of an active conflict is not very likely to reach a better equilibrium that both parties are happy with. Iran carried bloodstained schoolbags of kids killed in the Minab strike on the flight to Pakistan, they were certainly not there to surrender. I suspect the administration (or at least Vance) already knew this, and deliberately structured one-sided terms intended to be rejected so Trump can attempt building political scaffolding for escalation and blame Iran ("Look, we offered Iran a peace deal and they chose not to accept it"). Meanwhile, the Israelis have been busy!
Between accepting one of the greatest strategic defeats in decades, and trying to prosecute a horrific war amidst historic energy and food prices, we remain stuck with the latter.
Sure, and if we simply joined hands together and sang kumbaya we might unlock world peace. This is a meta level observation on the discrepancy in interpretive rigour. One domain demands extreme nuance, while the other is a closed case. If the shooter is trans, you must pussyfoot around their gender dysphoria, use polite language, trace their psychology with maximum granularity, and absolutely never generalise. This tells me that the "other side" does possess the critical thinking skills and understanding of basic human psychology necessary to recognise the complex pathways from social alienation to real world violence. So when they don't extend these complexities to the "manosphere" or incel adjacent spaces, and instead treat their alleged behaviours as deterministic, self-evident and ideologically settled, as well as silence alternative explanations that may deviate from their "right-think" priors, that is a conscious choice.
Charity is a two-way road.
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