dasfoo
3d ago
Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.
To be fair, Putin doesn't need multiple trials. Just one is enough. And sometimes a trial isn't even needed.
dasfoo
8d ago
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 see comments like this a lot, and it goes with the general sentiment that men don't respect women and only think of them as sex objects. The truth is that men do value women greatly for certain things that are unique to their womanhood and less for other things that are not unique to women. It's contemporary women who have devalued the qualities they have which men do value.
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.
I know this is controversial to say these days, but the bodies of men who act like women cannot do the things the real women can do with their bodies and, generally, women are highly valuable because of what their bodies are built to do: nurture life. If I owned a goat who just wanted sit in my chicken coop all day, he wouldn't be very valuable to me because he can't lay eggs.
I'm not saying that all people should be strictly limited to traditional gender roles -- there are outliers that just can't perform those roles. However, society is currently obsessed with making outliers the new normal, which is wreaking havoc on both the healthy operation of human interactions and the self-worth of those who have been yaslit into devaluing their natural gifts.
dasfoo
10d ago
That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.
It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt. One of the cleanest examples of this, historically, is the western Communist's appeal for human rights including freedom of speech, but only as it applies to their treatment by western governments. If the Communist were to take power, those rights would disappear instantly and any attempt to appeal to them on the basis of that shared value would reveal that it was never shared in the first place. There's not really a true coalition, unless you consider the conman and his mark in a coalition to steal the mark's money.
This is less clear on issues of bodily autonomy and meat production, but probably not hard to see less charitable angles if you zoom out a few levels and look at a bigger picture than just those issues.
dasfoo
4d ago
Is it a wise choice for a woman to opt into an identity with a mandatory retirement policy that's at most decade out? What's she supposed to envision doing for the rest of the time?
A person's value can change over time from one asset to another.
I know you want to read a lot into this, but it's reall very simple, and universal for both men and women:
If you want to be valued (beyond the default "all human life has value" value, which is a wash across the board), you need to provide value.
A young man, for example, is generally valuable for his strong back and plentiful energy; an old man is generally valuable for his learned wisdom, accrued wealth and maybe even skill at the management of young men. If an old man is stupid, poor and cannot lead the young, he is shirking his own value. It doesn't matter if other people want to imbue him with value or not, he provides nothing.
Women, likewise, can be valuable for a lot of things when they're younger, and less valuable for those things later, but valuable for other properties that align with their age and experience.
I am not proscribing that women only do certain things -- certainly there is variability with every person, and I'm libertarian in terms of what part the law should play in this -- but rather suggesting that women who complain that they aren't valued are probably not providing value out of their own choice. Just like men who don't feel valued by women. This type of value is not innate but something one must identify correctly and work towards providing. Old-fashioned gender roles were better at teaching young people how they can be of value to others than today's gender roles are.
dasfoo
22d ago
So... don't walk in a bad neighborhood if you don't want to be raped?
A better analogy would be: "If a cop stops you unjustly, don't ignore them or resist, but comply politely and address the issue through the proper channels."
However, it is also not wise to walk through a bad neighborhood alone and unarmed. Someone might do it anyway, but it amounts to bad advice for an expert in that neighborhood to recommend that someone do it.
dasfoo
17d ago
Could Silicon Valley, not unlike how they targeted Crowder's business through the algorithm, having also targeted his marriage?
I mean, yes? But probably not? And do you have any corroborating data outside of Crowder sitting in the middle of this Venn Diagram? "People shadowbanned by YouTube" & "People who got divorced?" Is anyone else even speculating about this?
I think any persuasive case would have to include some sort of theory for why instigating a divorce would be in any way beneficial to the conspirators. Is it known that non-divorced right-wing comedians are less desired by social media outlets? Or is the idea that social media companies are interested in causing divorces for some other reason and just picked people they don't like as guinea pigs?
dasfoo
1mo ago
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Covid was exactly the opposite, stoking fear rather than cooperation: "Isolate yourself. Other people will kill you by existing."
dasfoo
1mo ago
As far as Marvel goes, it's a potentially relevant side conversation that so much pop culture that is ostensibly aimed at younger kids -- superheroes, cartoons, YA fiction -- has become mainstream entertainment for adults. It's not just a de-sexing of society that is reflected in that kind of material, but a de-thinking or a de-maturing, which has troubled me. There should, IMO, be a transition in one's teen years from reading YA lit to A lit, because the ideas will be more complex and the conflicts more reflective of the choices and moral considerations that adults face in their lives. They can teach us how to think about complex subjects. I was reading a Reddit thread about Poor Things yesterday, and it's shocking how many people are so media-illiterate that they can't delineate between text and subtext. I partially blame the glut of YA media that has no subtext.
When I was 15/16, as an avid movie-watcher, I was expanding from Star Wars and Superman to stuff like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Akira Kurosawa. I can't imagine how stunted I would be now if I stuck to content that was created with a juvenile audience in mind. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of junk, but I try to keep it balanced. Even though the dumb horror movies I love push some easy pleasure buttons, they aren't what elevates me.
dasfoo
1mo ago
There actually was a tame (prelude to) sex scene in Marvel's The Eternals. It was a little controversial, but less so than the married gay couple later in the movie. It's the exception that proves the rule, however. I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie, but the culture pretty quickly moved away from scenes in which PG-13 heroes are seen with the most human of character flaws.
It's arguable that we're now entering the backlash period to this recent chasteness. Oppenheimer famously involves a gratuitous sex/nude scene, which doesn't seem to have hurt its critical or popular standing. Poor Things is balls-out sex and nudity. In the last two months, we've had new theatrical releases of the cunnilingus-and-dildo-filled Drive Away Dolls and now Love Lies Bleeding. As those last three suggest, it's likely that there's more appetite in Hollywood right now for sex content that de-emphasizes straight male sexuality -- a subject of criticism in Poor Things -- or that specifically focuses on queer eroticism, as those two new releases do.
Then again, we have the buoyant rise of Sidney Sweeney and the huge success of Anyone But You, which looks like a standard cis sex-com with old-fashioned eye candy for guys and girls. So there's an appetite for that kind of material; it's just whether or not Hollywood has the stomach to look past the scolds on Bluesky or whatever. Maybe the changes Musk has made to Twitter has scattered that kind of hive-mind prudishiness that started some of these movements?
dasfoo
1mo ago
Was this actually normal?
Yeah. A lot of the big actresses of the 1970s did nude scenes. Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, you name it. But these weren't necessarily small indie movies -- the studios were making these movies. "Naturalism" was part of the New Hollywood ethos and the new cultural frankness about sex.
Maybe there was some sense during the late 1980s that nudity had become a mark of low-class, but in the 1990s it came back and there was growing talk about how actresses could be taken more seriously by doing nude scenes, and I think Gwyneth Paltrow's nudity-inclusive Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love was used as a common example. It's hard to think of examples of big actresses from the past 20-30 years who have been shy on camera: Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Connelley, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry all had prominent nude scenes in or adjacent to Oscar-winning roles. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for a role involving explicit nudity, so it's not like it's ever fully gone away, there's just been a vocal movement against it.
dasfoo
5mo ago
I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest.
The old conservative fogey model is the song Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys: Young people should want to have sex and not do it, which encourages marriage. A world in which teenagers can have sex and don't want to is as gross a perversion of nature as supposedly switching genders, removing the focused drive that has inspired art and other achievements for millenia.
dasfoo
1mo ago
And that means also that that actress’ friends, family members, dentist, accountant, second-grade teachers, and everyone else can see it. And jerk off to it.
IIRC, David Lynch digitally altered a nude scene in Mulholland Drive for its home video incarnation specifically to lessen the online sharability of screen grabs.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.
And media that appeals to female fantasies of submission. Was just listening to a podcast about Three Days of the Condor, about half of which was moaning about the hostage-to-lover plot thread. Some women find that kind of thing of exciting; can we stop shaming lurid fictional fantasies of all stripes?
dasfoo
6mo ago
In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked"
Without even touching the gay/trans contradiction, this quoted part is one of my bugaboos. As journalism has firmly become more focused on persuasion over reporting, I hear this kind of unsubstantiated statement-of-worldview-as-fact so often from journalists and it always makes my head ache. Very often, concrete statements like this will be done absent of any actual investigation. I listen to a handful of daily short-form headlines podcasts from major organizations, and the base-stealing that goes on is nearly criminal.
For example, very often in news stories about Trump's election claims, the claims will be described by reporters as lies, whereas they are really claims without sufficient proof, which is different. They may in fact be lies, but the statement that they are lies is also often a claim without sufficient proof. Now, I happen to think that they are likely fantasy/wishful thinking, so I am on the side of those who by default disbelieve them, but I also try to maintain some epistemic humility. Most of the claims, as I understand it, have never actually been investigated beyond superficial questioning of motivated participants and taking or rejecting their word as befits the reporter's pre-established narrative.
You see this a lot in environmental reporting, where causality is assigned to "climate change" without attribution. We also saw in a lot of COVID reporting the annoying new pattern of new stories with headlines in the pattern of "No, (insert party) didn't (insert dissenting claim)..." which smugly "corrected" assumed misinformation without ever investigating the veracity of the claim. This example, No, Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=41cb66e65585), discusses why the claim is likely not true, and lists the weakman arguments it purports to debunk, but even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.
How much do you want to bet that the CNN panelist asserting that conversion therapy has been "debunked" could not cite a single study to that effect, but would more likely point to popular culture, like books/movies such as "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," "But I'm a Cheerleader," and "Boy Erased?"
dasfoo
5mo ago
The Supreme Court, and conservatives in general, do not want people to have gun rights. They want to make an abstract legal point about the Constitution, but they'd be horrified if it had any practical effect. "Sure, you have the right to keep and bear arms. But what makes you think that means you can carry a GUN?"
I have a lot of gun-owning conservatives in my social circle, and this sentiment is completely off-base, IME. Can you substantiate it?
dasfoo
7mo ago
I just watched a 2008 movie called "Baby Mama" starring Tina Fey.
In the movie, Tina Fey is reading a book about childbirth and is given a "nightmare" by the possibility of her child being a hermaphrodite or, in her words, "a chick with a dick". It's clear that this is being played for laughs even though, like the rest of the movie, it wasn't really funny.
It's crazy how far things have swung in just 15 years.
Thirty years ago I flirted with a career in comedy/TV writing. One of the most reliable tropes, I was taught, dating back hundreds of years (at least), was putting a man in a dress. The evidence that this nugget was a steadfast laugh-generator was apparent in a continuous stream from Shakespeare to Doubtfire. Now, it's the one thing above all others that can never be acknowledged as out-of-the-ordinary.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I went digging for numbers and found:
In 1833, Britain abolished slavery (mostly); about about 1% of the population were slaves In 1837, Mexico abolished slavery; about about 0.1% of the population were slaves In 1860, the South fought a ware to keep slavery; about 32% of the population were slaves In 1867, Spain largely freed its slaves; I can't find specific numbers :( In 1888, Brazil abolished slavery; about about 5% of the population were slaves
Why the percentage of the South that were slaves and not the U.S. as a whole? You didn't divide those other countries into the pro-slave and anti-slave factions. Seems like a stolen base, especially when it was the anti-slave half of the U.S. that precipitated the end of slavery, just like in those other countries that weren't carved up for stats.
dasfoo
4mo ago
To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004.
Weird example. Kerry was a worse candidate than Hillary, and he hoisted himself on his own petard by trying to run as a war hero when he was anything but. There was nothing shifty about swiftboating, unless using a candidate's own words and actions against him is now somehow sus.
dasfoo
4mo ago
If black people have magic and thus are able to do anything they want, why do they devote substantial amounts of time to keeping white people happy when they could instead
This same criticism was aimed at Black Panther's Wakanda, which apparently sat back with its advanced technology and hid from the world, allowing centuries of horrific abuse of other black people. I find a lot of fantasy-mixed-with-the-real-world fiction like this perplexing for these reasons. No one seems to have really thought about or grappled with the premises beyond the initial concept.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Its either a serious case of ideological blindness or serious levels of intellectual dishonesty to actually claim trans child == dead child.
It's stealing a base, but it's as apt a metaphor for the parents as it is for the trans people who use it to describe themselves.
I have a nephew who has claimed to be a girl for the last few years. He recently told his parents that he was encouraged to do this by his therapist as a way to mitigate suicidal feelings. He's still suicidal and worse now that he went through this insanity and it didn't help. In a way, his transition was a kind of failed metaphorical suicide attempt. I have no idea how parents react to a child who tried and failed to kill themselves, except from movies like Ordinary People, but it's like a kind of death. There's grieving for sure. It turns death from a remote specter to an omnipresent reality in every future interaction with that child. Parents tend to irrationally fear the worst, anyway; although you compartmentalize such fears as irrational. After a suicide attempt, however, they have pictured their kid dead as reality and now will fear suicide every time the phone rings and probably for most minutes in between those phone calls. If it's not death it must be an excruciating and unrelenting tease of death.
It's not a huge leap for me to assume that the parental reaction to a serious suicide attempt would be similar to a reaction to a supposed gender transition.
There's also a kind of an "undead" quality to their presence after transition, like in a horror movie where a loved one has returned as a vampire or zombie. There's this uncanny valley between the person you used to think you knew and this disturbing thing that has replaced them that signifies something no one wants to address or think about. While is does not threaten harm, it casts a pall of unease over every interaction. If it's not the death of a person, it is like the death of normalcy. Maybe normalcy was a fantasy, but it was a mutually agreed fantasy that has been destroyed by this thing that lives between the lines of order and now stares everyone in the face in broad daylight, and you know that both you are shamed by how you react to its presence as it is shamed by the disruption of its unspeakable presence in its current form. It's a death that has half-happened and stands in the room as a reminder of its possibility and yet can't be spoken about. Is that worse than death? With death there is peace. Maybe there's not a word for it yet, and death is the closest we can come up with so far.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Hispanic Guy (Joaquin Phoenix)
Seriously? (I will assume this is sarcastic...)
His parents were named John Lee Bottom and Arlyn "Heart" Dunetz.
"His father was a Catholic from Fontana, California, and was of English, German and French ancestry.[7] His maternal grandfather, Meyer Dunetz, was Russian Jewish..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin_Phoenix#Early_life
They were hippies that gave their other kids names like River and Liberty.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I used to marvel at how well the men were written on SATC, until it dawned on me that the show was run and written mostly by gay men. They understood men from both empathetic and adversarial positions.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I don't understand this sentence. No amount of women "show[ing] off" justifies sexual assault or harassment.
Not justifies, is. You don't think a woman showing a lot of cleavage or leg at work might be analogous to other actions considered sexual harassment? That is, if it makes men think about sex or uncomfortable about where to look when talking to the woman, surely that's not dissimilar from men making overheard suggestive comments.
LOL. Lynch is not involved in any of the movie's romantic subplots, although he references a complicated personal life offscreen. His thoughts on feminism are quite amusing. He is the highlight of a fun movie, but irrelevant to your subject of interest here.
The main romantic pairing in the movie is between a black lesbian and bi-sexual (half-?)asian girl.
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