There's the classic trope that makes an appearance, where a Western girlboss obediently throws on a headscarf and covers herself up to appease Muslim men.
Yep, I remember one such a case, when the first all feminist cabinet in the world from Sweden dutifully donned hijabs while visiting Iran.
Bit of a trick in this one. What are 'male responsibilities?'
I'd posit:
Go out hunting and bring back meat for the tribe. If a rival tribe attacks, take up arms and repel them, with deadly force if needed. If natural disaster strikes, rescue as many as possible and protect from as much damage as possible. Do the heavy lifting to build things/rebuild after disaster.
I think your list is too anachronistic. In general, the role of men is to produce, refine, distribute and protect resources. All of these roles are still held by large majority of men, ranging from mining, farming, construction, infrastructure maintenance, police, army, manufacturing and virtually all the actually important things in the meat space. All of these things rely heavily on men with the participation ranging from 80% to 99%. And even then, the actual numbers are heavily obfuscated by specific support roles women do in these fields anyway. The same goes for STEM fields except medicine, especially engineering and other tasks. Despite all the feminist progress, the general gender roles did not change - men still do construction and police work, women are still nurses and care for children as teachers and nannies and they deliver nice sandwiches to men with a forced smile as waiters and so on. They perform similar jobs as they performed in 18th century, only with some modern systems muddling the waters.
In fact it is a very common argument around in manospohere: if tomorrow all the women disappeared, remaining men would do just fine until they die of old age. If it was the other way around, women would starve and die en masse within weeks or months. The society is still one huge resource transfer from men toward women and children - if women decide to have them that is - as it was centuries ago. But it is now hidden under jargon of rights and political process and largess created by cushy positions in government bureaucracy and similar jobs.
As an example - it is "easy" to be a divorced mother, if government forces men to still do their part of the marriage contract of supporting the family financially in form of alimony and child support, while women have no duties toward their ex husbands. In one sense seeing women in such a power seems like matriarchy, but she still relies on men for everything - be it her ex husband, or overwhelmingly male police force for protection of her person and her legal entitlements. I heard quite a convincing argument that this is still a patriarchy - women appeal to men to provide and protect them as usual, it is just that the modern patriarchy is benevolent enough to grant them their illusion of power and laughable notion of "equality".
But it is still an illusion - just because the patriarchy is benevolent toward women and oppresses fellow men, it does not mean it is not one such. Men always oppressed other men under patriarchy. Heck men oppressed other men in favor of women such as in Sparta, where women formed their own hugely powerful class of magnates called heiresses by inheriting wealth of their deceased husbands, or many other nations, where men risked their lives in war of conquest and subjugation only to bring slaves and jewels to entertain their mothers, wives and daughters. That is nothing new.
The thing is that if men collectively, or even in majority minority refuse to participate anymore, the illusion dissolves within days. We saw it recently after Afghanistan withdrawal, when Taliban warriors just leisurely waltzed in and subjugated women without any fuss, literally laughing at the notion of women's political rights.
Women are collectively incapable of putting up any resistance if men refuse to do so for them. There was never any female Spartacus waging war of liberation with her fellow Amazonians against oppression. All women can do is whine and appeal the patriarchy to entertain doing something about their position.
georgioz
2mo ago
Just my experience, but I've found if you go "above and beyond", you're not going to be recognised or even thanked. Hey, you want to do extra free labour for me? Great, go right ahead, dummy!
I have seen this argument from people in real life and also on the internet and to be frank, there seems to be some misunderstanding regarding the employee-employer relation, especially lack of knowledge of being put in shoes of your direct manager. The main counterargument is this: what is the alterntive? Just doing your job?
I lead people and if there is a time for promotion discussion, what is supposed to be an argument for promotion?
Look georgioz, I know I have average results when it comes to my work, but it was because I was not paid. I have a huge potential, but I will only show it if you promote me.
Hell no. You can be promoted only if you show that you have skills worthy of that position, otherwise it creates a load of issues inside the team. I have had people with this kind of mercenary attitude inside my team and in my experience it is always one-sided. They ask for extra money for extra work, but they are often not prepared for salary cut if they are subpar for whatever reason - health, personal issues or maybe even because it was just calm month or anything like that. Of course there are mercenary positions like that such as sales, various contractors or workers in legal field who literally bill manhours or who have large variable part of their salary and who have to work for every single cent they can provably earn.
But this is not the case for regular positions such as IT admin or accountant etc. There are some unspoken rules: if you are accountant, it is implicitly understood, that there will be more work around quarterly earning reports or when taxes are due. If you are in IT, it is understood that you need to put more when a new system is being implemented or when some security crisis happens. This is compensated by less work on regular workday in summer let's say.
It is also common sense. A manager has other things to do than babysit everybody who bitches that he had to stay at work because customer call took 10 minutes longer after their shift ended and who asks for extra overtime and who bitches over that injustice for next week to everybody around him or some such - while of course not mentioning when the manager let him leave earlier to pick up his kid last week because his wife was stuck with something. It is just stupid busywork, I don't have time for such powergames. There should be some basic relationship that smooths over these kind of fluctuations without having constant excel sheet tally of who owes what to whom. It is also likely that such a person will show the same behavior toward his colleagues, not providing necessary support unless specially motivated. It is just not worth it.
Oh, of course the usual battle of who used it first, like with the woke, and if it is endonym or exonym. Whatever the case, the term was a global trend with Chinese lying flat or Great Resignation during pandemic when people left their work for pandemic relief and other issues. It was also a time of huge popularity if /r/antiwork subreddit.
But in the end I do agree with you, there is nothing new here. Since the time memorial, there were regular punch the card people, there were always passively aggressive and dissatisfied employees with some sort of vengeance against their employer and of course there were "go above and beyond" workaholic employees. There were always conflicts between these groups where quiet quitters despised workaholic udarniks for raising quotas of production for the rest of them and all of that. Which is kind of the point I wanted to convey to the OP - his Dilbert fantasy of how everybody hates their job is not something that is to be expected.
To a lot of people, especially those who deny HBD, there seems to be a complete lack of connectivity between real world actors doing things that drive forward history and history itself. It's like they see history as a movement independent of people. That it was preordained or inevitable that certain developments would happen at certain times.
It does not have anything with regards to HBD, it is more related to Hegelian philosophy, or one could even call it a religion. Hegel was the most influential philosopher of the 19th century who integrated older philosophers like Schiller and Rousseau into his concept of History - the concept where the history is a progressive project of Hegelian dialectics, where people are only actors "discovering" the preordained path of how to abolish opposite concepts into their new higher synthesis. Hegel himself was more of an idealist, where he saw his Geist as the moving force ranging from Weltgeist through Zeitgeist and Volksgeist. In his view the great men of history are products of their Zeitgeist - they are the ultimate incarnation of their era who move the history forward into another revolution, they personalize and enable the synthesis of higher level of Geist in an inevitable march of progress. While I would not say that Hegel's philosophy is explicitly racist, it is also not not-racist. It is absolutely possible that the forces of history will obliterate races, ideologies, religions and basically anything else in lieu of progress. It may not be necessary, but in this philosophy the end justifies the means - what if billions need to perish for progress, if it will bring more progressive society for untold trillions.
Of course Marxism is an offshoot of Hegelianism, he just flipped the script from idealism to materialism. Heck, Karl Marx himself popped out of Young Hegelian movement so of course his philosophy incorporates many of Hegel's concepts including dialectics, now called Dialectical Materialism, Hegel's concept of History which Marx turned into his focus on class struggle stemming from material conditions and his historical stages toward Communism and many more. But I'd also argue that OG Marxism is not against HBD or racism, similar to Hegel, these concepts are tangential to the true forces of History. It is only the more modern interpretation where racial oppression was added to the whole edifice, often on top of class oppression. Marx himself was extremely racist - at least from modern moral stance - approvingly quoting Trémaux theory that the common Negro type was a degeneration from a quite higher one in his letter to Engels in 1866, probably spurred by the fact that his son-in-law Paul Lafargue was of creole origin an Marx had some nasty things to say about him in his letters. Although to Marx "defense", he was extremely nasty person to everybody around himself including his wife, children, parents and his best buddy Engels, so this should not be surprising.
This is nothing new at least for me, it is Havel's greengrocer problem all the way down. Majority of the CW stuff also comes down to this, especially related to corporate environment where people are softly pushed into wearing rainbow keychains or attend Women at X lectures etc.
But there is also something to be said for maintaining positive attitude toward your work in general. I dislike 24x7 grumpy whiners, who are just doom and gloom about everything, poisoning the well for everybody else. A company gives you a gift card as a present - oh my god, those stupid fuckers should have given cash instead. These people are sometimes pain in the ass to be around, in the end there is a time to stop whining, grit your teeth and just move forward.
Poisoning the well is now present quite explicitly with a new "trend" of so called quiet quitting - because of course everything is now a TikTok trend - which is basically just the idea of punching the card, doing what is necessary and come home to family or church or you garden or other hobbies where you self-actualize. You know, the thing most factory workers were doing for centuries. Except now, it is a life philosophy and some people see it as a mission in their life, it is their hobby they do when they come home from work. They expect to be hailed as a new Socrates or maybe even Karl Marx, awakening white collar class to their oppression and pointlessness of their work and achievements and everything. They think that Wally from Dilbert is a role model to be followed, where the goal is to become corporate ninja and sabotage the company as much as possible without getting caught, instead of a comical relief.
As with all things, everything in moderation.
georgioz
2mo ago
Yep, I remember a high profile case of Moroccan soccer player who got out of divorce settlement worth $70 million, as apparently everything was owned by his mother.
I mean the same thing can be said about progressive "Christians" and their worldview. You talk about Sidney Sweeney, but there are female protestant ministers blessing a wedding of polycules of 4 gays out there.
I think this is the point the OP wanted to make - protestant churches were infected with progressive feminism to the extent, that they are going out of their way to accept only fan whores now doing a ministry, attacking any sceptics as unchristian, you have hundreds of churches accepting LGBT lifestyles as a new normal. There are churches with "neutral" stance toward abortion, the very same churches and more are also condoning divorces.
So groypers are just pretend racist, sexist and bad Christians. Of course, but where is the same criticism for their leftist radicals, where are the calls to expel them from the body of Christ before their heretic ways bring the whole edifice down? Or are there arguments how there should be Christian love to sinners - of course except the sin of progressive racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia, those are the newly implanted 4 commandments. That is the point I think the OP makes.
My basic idea is something like this: the Catholic church in Western Europe went way too hard enforcing the persecution of heresy, especially against mystics and those practicing contemplative-style prayer outside of monasteries, where they could be easily controlled. You see this especially in the persecution of the Cathars, which while their gnostic ideas were obviously wrong, I think the Catholic church made a huge mistake by not incorporating the obvious need for more direct mystical and experiential understanding of the faith amongst the laity, and disaffected factions.
This is not true, the Catholic church has space for mysticism in form of over 10 thousand saints - including doctors of faith - having mystical experiences, for which the Church is of course mocked by atheists and protestants alike. The point being is that Catholic church examines these experiences to weed out heretic beliefs exactly in order not to introduce them to the fold. Otherwise before long you will have female bishops wedding 4 polyamorous gays. It is only rejected mysticism let's say related to Arianism or Gnosticism which were rooted out. But the Catholic church acknowledges things like stigmata, exorcism and miracles to this day when they venerate a new saint.
I think the core of the issue is misunderstanding of what true united church would look like. Catholic church was for thousands of years a world spanning organization now encompassing billions of people. For some like you, they focus on scholastic and rational tradition of Thomas Aquinas. For others, Catholics were anti-science barbarians and yet for some, Catholics are heretics engaging in dangerous mysticism not supported in scripture. You can pick and chose what to criticize, a root meaning in the word heresy. When protestants disagree, they splinter in one of now 40,000 churches. When Catholics disagree, they have a process which includes pluralism and syncretism to keep the core beliefs intact under other pillars of the church.
Ultimately I think this is a major issue, and one at the core of the modern 'meta-crisis.' Taking a page out of Jordan Peterson's book, I think that much of especially human society can be seen as a dialectical tension between chaos and order. I think that the left I've broadly sketched here represents chaos, and the right represents order.
See, Jordan Peterson is a Cultural Christian and basically an atheist. For him the Jesus Christ is anything but a historical figure, Son of God who was resurrected for our sins. His Christology is heretical - he views him as an archetype, as a good story and anything but what he really was. He even refuses to answer what he thinks about historical Jesus for dozens of times when asked, hedging his response exactly in Jungian terms. He literally picks and chooses what he likes about God and Christ and weaves that into his understanding - which is literal definition of the word heresy or hairesis (αἵρεσις) - to choose. To choose what you accept, what you ignore and what you add.
The Jungian dialectics between chaos and order, the supposed feminine and masculine principle or even political left and right is definitely not part of Catholic teaching. In fact it is closer to the Hegelian understanding of the state of things, which in turn is very close to Gnosticism - a belief that God is supposed to be realized by humans who interact via social structures. This is as anticatholic as it gets, it goes back to early church when they combated this heresy.
I am a huge fan of Expanded Universe, which also killed Star Wars in many other ways. There were many other interesting expansions, the most famous being that of admiral Thrawn painting the Empire in slightly better way and subverting the movie narratives a little bit. Then there was now non-canonic Yuuzhan Vong War, which made the post Empire republic look stupid, partly vindicating the Empire as they would have been able to deal with that out of galaxy invasion much more efficiently with their technology of star destroyers and Death Stars. And of course there were several force users, who claimed that there was no Dark or Light side and that the force is just a tool to be used for good. An interesting idea which was developed quite a lot in EU and which produced some Sith Lords and light masters, questioning the dichotomy between the force sides.
The main thing going against The Last Jedi is not that it destroyed the themes in the original movies, but that it was just shit. The fandom would jump on other perspectives or even non-canonical things happening - if they were good.
This is interesting as I completely agree with you but for other reasons. The Gillette me-too ad made their CEO doubling and tripling down, costing the brand decades of goodwill and brand power valued in billions. The 2016 Ghostbusters was a flop costing the studio somewhere in the range of $80 million.
This exactly shows my point, it is no longer wives that buy feminist razors for their husbands, or boyfriends taking their girlfriends to movies they maybe like. If anything, you provide prime examples of how the situation changed, and it will get more polarized in the future. If western companies won't provide what men want, there are always entrepreneurs from other countries willing to accommodate.
georgioz
2mo ago
A more correct statement would be that they used to spend less than women, because women used to spend their money. The modern world of loneliness is unlike anything we have seen before. If you have tens of millions of single men, they will spend their hard earned money on something. What it will be is anyone's guess, but it will be a seismic shift.
One of the pet theories I have is pure economics. It is a public knowledge that women make 85% of purchases and they account for 80% of consumer spending. We also have predictions about "sheconomy" by Morgan & Stanley that 45% of women will be single and childless by 2030. By the way sheconomy is an interesting choice of a word for what is named as “male lonelines epidemic” on the other side of the gender coin, but that is besides the point.
Now what is more important is what is left unsaid. Yes, women used to make most purchasing decisions - because they went shopping using their husband's credit card. If 45% of women will be single by 2030, it by virtue of mathematics also means, that there will be similar number of single men in charge of their own spending, men who are increasingly moving to the right compared to women. This means that in totality the purchasing power of male population is probably going to increase significantly, and that pandering solely to increasingly progressive women by companies and advertisers may no longer be the winning strategy as Gillette or Anheuser-Busch learned the hard way. We may see some more surprises in upcoming years solely due to economic factors outside of any culture aspects.
Possibly. She did not say anything per se, she basically refused to answer or "take the opportunity" to apologize for perceived racism of "good jeans/genes" ad. But I guess refusing to make a statement can be considered a scissor statement in that sense, especially in the context where the whole concept is broad enough to encompass anything, including stuff like "men should sit when they pee".
For me real scissor statement should be something that is genuinely surprising, where the other side did not know that different view is even possible. So for instance "trans women are women" is not exactly a scissor in this day and age although it may have started as one, similar to "its okay to be white". Mild scissor can be something like "hotdogs are sandwiches" or "tomato is a fruit". In that sense Sweeney refusing to apologize for perceived racism in that context can be considered a surprising scissor, as it is not something people expect from Hollywood starlet.
It reminded me of another similar example of recent scissor statement, where the Dune star Timothée Chalamet called child free life as bleak. The response was of course ranging from "of course, does anybody thinks differently?" through "its easy for him to say when he is a millionaire" to "there is nothing bleak being independent childless woman".
Absolutely. I think Scott had a good article somewhere around human language. The gist of the idea is that natural language is meant for broad communication of general concepts. It presupposes certain common knowledge and discards uncommon outliers, which increases data throughput. On the opposite side is precise scientific or even mathematical language. It focuses exactly on the edge cases between general concepts and hones on minute differences given their theoretical or experimental setup.
Let me give an example in common parlance: please take a chair. Everybody knows what is a chair. This is a chair. This is also a chair. This may also be a chair. This is not a chair, it is a table. But there may be some outliers which on rare occasion can make things complicated: is this a chair? It looks like a tree stump which is definitely not a chair. Or is it? We had a distinction between a chair and a table - what about this one?
Scientific parlance: please move your body over there to the object that consists of four wooden square prisms connected to wooden plank with backrest and armrest. What is armrest you ask? It is of geometric shape of .... You can go all the way down to any specific details and say this unassuming sentence using whole books of related physical, chemical and mathematical concepts, possbly invariably incorporating all the human knowledge. It is absolute overkill for normal speech.
There are so many issues stemming from misunderstanding what type of language we are using, or even using scientific term in its common meaning as a special subset of polysemy. One of the most egregious examples can be always found in economy where common words like demand, capital, investment and many others have specific scientific meaning with huge difference related to common usage of those word. But there are many more such examples.
Yudkowsky had it correct when he observed, that many problems can be easily answered by dissolving the question instead of immediately embracing your presuppositions and focusing on the answer. This is age old tactics of combating sophist arguments that rely on equivocations and other tricks to mystify and confuse all the participants.
georgioz
2mo ago
All good points including Evans Veres also being a huge dick. I am not against children's literature - I am quite a fan of The Three Investigators and they did dumb shit constantly, including going against dangerous hardened criminals alone or crawling into unknown dark caverns just because. I am not at all against the genre and it was not necessarily meant as a criticism of Harry Potter which I also like quite a lot. It was more to point that Harry being moron is a fact and most heroes of these children books are quite self-aware of that.
While awaiting trial at the Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, a paramilitary group that opposes Voldemort and his own paramilitary group, Harry is also systematically excluded from the operations of the group by its adult members.
To be honest, throughout all the books Harry acted impulsively and against good advice of most of his allies. There is a reason why Yud was pissed or let's say motivated enough, to create a non-moronic version of Harry in his own fanfic. The fact that Harry even lives can be assigned more to dumb luck rather than anything else, so it makes sense that people keep secrets from him. Heck, Dumbledore himself held the prophecy for himself and told to Harry about it only in OOTP book you read - because basically he thought that Harry would be dumb enough to disobey and get himself killed if told earlier. And for good reason, Harry is just a child and being dumb is excusable. The same goes for Dumbledore keeping the truth about horcruxes for himself up until the last minute. The idea was to keep Harry free of concerns and give him normal childhood, but the unsaid part in this noble speech is that Dumbledore did not trust that Harry would keep it all secret, and would spill it over to somebody so that Voldemort would learn about the fact, and he would put together that Harry is a horcrux.
By the way, there is a great video comparing Frodo Baggins and Harry Potter as heroes, arguing that they are the opposites. Harry is the "chosen one", a special hero who on the other hand acts like a moron trying to do normal stuff like playing sports games and fooling around, while almost getting himself killed multiple times due to his own stupidity. Of course a lot of it is a plot device to make especially Hermione look awesome, but it is still there as his character trait. While Frodo is a normal or even unassuming guy especially among the heroes of the fellowship, but he almost always acts with integrity, courage and wisdom. This in turn paradoxically makes him extra special to the extent that he is even trusted with the One Ring as he can resist its temptations.
Ironman/Robert Downey Jr. with comparable real life cultural icon being that of Elon Musk. When I think about it, modifying Bruce Wayne/Batman fits more than ever with decadent society turning into Gotham City real fast.
I will not be the first to use this comparison, but the startup tech-savvy entrepreneur is the modern version of pirate/conquistador/adventurer. They are highly individualistic people who carve their own space in hostile environment already occupied by corporate and state behemoths, often winning with boldness and intelligence racking huge treasures, fame and armies of women from around the world, who want to have babies with them.
Give them buff physique from gym, interest in MMA and Brazilian jiujutsu and some gun kata skills they use when cartel goons break into their underground bunker/office next to private power plant in Panama in order to kidnap them to steal some cryptocurrency. You have a pretty compelling hero right there. Maybe even more so than some naive secret service government spook which is so uncool today. You can even spice it up by making him traditional Catholic with some templar ethos or something.
This seems strange to me, as one of the cornerstones of at least Catholic doctrine is the concept of Natural Law, which is basically God's law written on human heart, even that of secularists. The idea is that God's law is immutable and universal, and Christians should not be surprised if other people hold facets of it.
georgioz
2mo ago
What is the difference that justifies, in purely secular, non-religious terms, treating gay couples differently than straight ones?
This is easy. You can be secular Cultural Christian. You do not believe in God, do not pray and you do not go to church. But you adhere to Christian Ethics purely due to your preference in the same way let's say some secular people prefer libertarianism, other people prefer progressivism and yet other prefer communism or whatnot. So it is purely my preference that stems from my materialist mind in this materialist world, and this preference has equal validity as your preference.
Or if you dislike that argument, I can borrow tankie secular argument against gay relations: it is a result of decadence of bourgeoise and fascist society, it goes against reproduction of worker class and thus it is inherently counterrevolutionary and reactionary.
georgioz
2mo ago
Where is the use of force implied by the poster above me?
Even nazis didn’t start like this, they had the Madagascar plan. Call it an intuition when government proposes death as a solution to a mundane problem. And what is next.
georgioz
2mo ago
There was a case of former soldier paraolympic medal winner who asked for 5 years to get assistance with ramp for her wheelchair in her home. Instead Canadian government offered to finance assisted suicide if she is "desperate". Euthanizing war veterans on wheelchairs seems to me as Nazi as it can get. And that was back in 2022.
Many other such cases, it will only grow. The overall trend goes up, the number of people euthanized by MAID in canada rose from 5,000 in 2018 to 15,000 in 2023 and is was fifth leading cause of death in Canada in 2022 and now is probably 4th.
That said, if you want to redefine modern marriage to exclude people who are provably infertile in advance, I'm all for it.
This is to large extent already happening, as the institution was hollowed out for decades, many people especially secularists are now questioning the meaning of marriage altogether, as they realize that all these Disney stories about love don't make sense. Nobody needs a paper from government certifying that two people love each other, especially if it is extremely easy to get a divorce and secularists are raving about and supporting "alternative families" anyways. The societal advantages are evaporating every year, less and less people care if somebody is married or not, with or without children. Every year there is less social stigma, but in turn marriage also has less support from communities.
Modern secular marriage is something akin to cargo cult, an idea running on vapors, mimicking the outside appearance of something that worked in the past. I think this was also the main drive behind gay marriages - they wanted to leech off of the legitimacy and high status of the institution in order to normalize their lifestyles. As with everything, each action has a reaction, and all these things changed the institution itself. I am not solely blaming gay marriages for this, the trend began long before that, but legalizing same sex marriages kind of hammered the idea home - do you really want to be in a marriage club with gays and weirdos running various marriage frauds?
As of now the marriage only make sense in religious communities, where it retains its inherent meaning, purpose and where it is seen as a sacrament with sacred vows and everything. The differences are stark enough compared to modern secular marriage, that it should probably get a new name. Maybe something how Catholics use it: secular union is a concubinage, while religious union is sacramental marriage. Then who cares what secularists and atheists declare themselves - they can create a secular union with their gay sex partner or with their polyamorous polycule out in Vegas in front of Elvis or just a two (or three or ten of them) exchanging ribbons under some old tree or whatever as a proof of whatever they want to declare and capture for their TikTok audience. It is still not a marriage from Christian standpoint.
His name is Scott Sumner, not to be confused with Larry Summers or any other economist with a similar name. I followed Scott before he moved his blog to substack blog between let's say 2010+ up until he switched to more politics. I really like Scott's economic analysis together with his pal Nick Rowe with his now defunct Worthwile Canadian Initiative.
Otherwise I agree with him on the point. Inflation is a good way to look at things short term - let's say 2023 vs 2024 with several caveats. But it is wholly inadequate measure comparing different time periods when basket of goods completely changed in their composition and quality.
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