georgioz
1d ago
Maybe you jest, but there was a ministorm in my country where foreign media reported it as Slovak government banned running by limiting limit for pedestrians to 6km/h.
Of course all they did was that they defined the value of "walking speed" in the law, but that speed only applies to vehicles, especially electric bikes or scooters who are driving on the sidewalks among pedestrian traffic.
By the way it was a funny thing as many people in Slovakia scratched their heads and saw first hand how sensationalist many "respectable" media were. It was Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on large scale, as domestically it was considered a good law or at least good intent aimed at a real problem of people driving around on the sidewalks with scooters going 40km/h.
georgioz
1d ago
This is nothing controversial, you can find many articles regarding this. For instance here is the article about how government cuts disproportionally affect women and especially black women
Actually there was the New Stateman article recently that found such a radical shift. It is paywalled but the shift even between Millennial and Gen Z women was staggering when it came to basic attitude of women toward men. I think 21% of women said they have strongly negative attitude toward men compared to 7% of men saying the same. It is hard to imagine that there will be meaningful pairbonding between these groups.
I do think that individually you can get away from it - what else is there. But there is a strong trend that is hard to overcome. Women attitudes and political leanings are shifting en masse, it will have macro impact on society, there is no ifs or buts about that. Maybe it will be passport bros or some other shift, but there will be one.
You had these ideas all the time, in fact this shift to nationalism is how the original socialism evolved right after Lenin's death. This is how it worked everywhere since the beginning - be it Stalinism or Maoism, or different strains of socialism with nationalistic characteristics including Chavismo, Pol Potism etc. Some of them were also more pragmatic and more friendly toward capital such as Titoism or Dengism or Đổi Mới in Vietnam. You also have extremes such as in North Korea with outright ultranationalist Juche ideology and cult of personality which looks closer to absolute monarchy. This is the horseshoe theory in practice - socialist states evolve into fascist states by market reforms and fascist states sometimes evolve toward more outright socialism such as with Peronism or Ba'athism. They all gravitate toward this petty corrupt tyranny.
All of them to the single one are unable to solve shit, not to even talk about issues you are pointing out. This is the feature, not a bug of all the socialist systems. It is in their DNA that they will never achieve their purported goals.
Women have fewer viable non-degree paths to stability. As the economy has shifted away from industrial and physical labor toward knowledge and service work, many of the historically male-dominated “no degree required” paths (e.g., trades, manufacturing) haven’t translated as easily for women at scale. That makes higher education a more central route to security.
I think that the issue with women and jobs is even more pronounced. For instance in USA women are overrepresented among government and government adjacent workforce such as education or healthcare. We are talking 70% of government workforce being women, with government employing close to 50% of all working women. Another chunk of women work for various NGOs, often also financed by government - NGOs have 75% female employees - although there is of course significant overlap between healthcare and education there. But there is also a lot of activism and lobbying for women to keep it all going.
As for the rest, there is also huge transfer from men to women through welfare and pension systems and other benefits. In the British study, men contribute twice as much as women toward social welfare with women drawing a lot more being net beneficiaries. It is now a meme of women being married to the state, but I do think that it is hugely important. It is not only that women who are employed by the government & adjacent sectors, they are also major beneficiaries of taxes & welfae, but they also benefit from private arrangements as child support, alimony and other wealth transfers related to divorce.
In a sense a lot of the problems are at the same time insanely complex but also very easy to solve. Just limit the welfare state, gut the government, stop government from meddling in marriages and divorces in terms of wealth transfers. You will find that as soon as men and women touch the grass without government forced adult kindergartens indulging fantasies, you can improve the situation quite a lot. Absent government, people turn toward family as basic unit for social welfare. Of course good luck with that in current populist democracies that know only how to increase welfare and public spending. In France, the government distributes 57% of all production and it is still not enough. Marxists have it correct, destroying family and state redistribution goes hand-in-hand.
I think this whole thing is on the precipice of collapse. I see a lot more people outright refusing to participate - the tax system got so bad that even high-earners find it hard to rationalize certain purchases. When it starts to make more sense for a professional to do basic work such as cooking as opposed to go for a lunch in restaurant, you have a problem. But this is inevitability with insane taxes especially facing private sector people. It reminds me how toward the end of Western Roman Empire people just turned into private villas and surrounding villages creating protofeudal autarkic economies, as the taxes for trade got insanely bad to the extent that economic exchange made no sense with so many parasites sucking the lifeblood of the few productive people left.
georgioz
6d ago
I think that in a sense pro-war side achieved some stuff already:
- Delay of nuclear program by destroying more infrastructure and killing scientists.
- Calling Iran's bluff on Hormuz, restoring credibility to threats of force on personal and strategic level
- Aligning at least some Gulf states toward USA. At least Saudis and UAE are calling for more "conclusive action" vis-a-vis Iran.
- Chaos for Iran proxies such as Hezbollah and Houthis. This is double edged sword of course, it is hard to see.
- Chaos in Iran by fragmenting leadership between Iranian Guards, civilian governments and the rest of it. Again, double edged sword.
In a sense Iran also shot itself into a foot by claiming to shadow mine the strait as well as by damaging refineries, so it is impossible to return to pre-war oil supply. This makes it hard to negotiate but it also relieves all sides from blame. I think it also means a very good position for Democrats as they may lay into Trump without actually doing anything notably wrong. There is not much more Trump can do at this point, a lot of options are out of his hand.
The problem is that nations are not games of civilization with some benevolent player moving things around. Totalitarian states solve for one thing and one thing only: accumulation and protection of power. The power is then exercised mainly in these self-centered ways and sometimes on insane projects like Ceaușescu’s Palace of the Parliament or Castro’s "Ubre Blanca" icecream parlor and related diary projects or of course Deng's One Child policy in China.
Yes, I actually would posit such an argument. In a sense even modern democracies are much, much more authoritarian than even medieval states. The level of taxation and control over information and communities is absolutely insane, there never was such a domination before even in dreams of absolutist monarch such as Louis the XIV, where his orders took weeks or months to get somewhere, often only in distorted manner that was implemented only partially.
By the way something similar happens also in socialist and fascist countries, but the distortion is more deliberate corruption
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