urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
The two most interesting motte posts that shaped my views on the dating world were one by a poster who I don't think posts here any more, who made an argument that the sexual revolution can't be inherently responsible for the male-female happiness gap because such a large gap is present only in the United States and not in Europe, where the revolution happened even more strongly; and @Terracotta linking a chart that showed the massive climb in obesity in the US, suggesting that if you're looking for a woman who does not qualify as obese or overweight, you're limited to the top 25% of women -- who, of course, are interested in similarly-top men.
Both of these convinced me something funky is going on in the US in particular, and that the obesity crisis, as well as general physical fitness (young men don't have muscle like they used to), are responsible for the unique unhappiness of American dating.
For example there are a fair number of converts to orthodoxy that seem to push for rebapism as if they’re joining a new religion.
This isn’t an orthodox convert-generated phenomenon; there’s a longstanding (as in centuries) dispute in Orthodox praxis over whether converts from other Christian traditions should be baptized. The general trend is to say ‘no’, but this is supported by a theological view that generally argues baptism is not grace-filled unless the baptizer is an Orthodox individual, preferably a priest or deacon. Most converts to Orthodoxy are received by chrismation, the term for what is called confirmation in Catholic parlance, which is given great significance as a means of completing baptism in Orthodox theology. The view is that chrismation back-fills grace into a baptism that was performed outside the Orthodox Church. But the view of Orthodoxy generally is that non-Orthodox baptisms aren’t really baptisms, in the strict mystical sense they believe is significant.
The reason converts sometimes push for a rebaptism is because there are some Orthodox rigorists — most notably Mount Athos, one of the holiest monasteries in Orthodox culture — that will interrogate converts and refuse communion to those who were not baptized Orthodox and instead received by chrismation. The converts are trying to deal with an unfortunate situation by aiming for what’s universally accepted, so that no one will have grounds to reject their reception into the Orthodox Church. It’s the rigorists’ fault, not the converts’.
The best comparison point would be Baptists — who, of course, believe that someone baptized as an infant should be baptized instead as an adult, and that infant baptisms aren’t ‘real’. They couple that with a less mystical and more symbolic interpretation of baptism, but nevertheless they believe that other Christian groups are doing baptism wrong in certain cases and that those who were incorrectly baptized ought to be baptized in the proper way, even if that means repeating it. While Catholics and magisterial Protestants have long agreed on baptismal validity, Baptists and Orthodox stand outside that consensus for different reasons.
So it’s not really about the converts hating the old forms of Christianity they grew up in — though that certainly can be a part of an individual’s psychology — and more a serious theological dispute within Orthodoxy about proper baptismal practice that they’re trying to navigate based on conscience. As with everything, the Official Orthodox Answer is “be received however your priest says you should.”
I believe Thomas meant to emphasize the lower-case orthodoxy in his statement about what could be successful in the 21st century. It's admittedly hard to distinguish sometimes when people are talking about Eastern Orthodoxy or Oriental Orthodoxy or mainstream Nicene lowercase orthodoxy, but, well, all Christian groups claim to be a part of the "Church Catholic" (which means in parlance something different from the "Catholic Church", but try telling the LCMS that), and most Christians are big believers in the evangelion, and most believe in the charismata... so the ambiguity goes on.
Interestingly, in cishet girl lore, there's a coping fantasy about a particular kind of female physicality, distinct from the normal T&A variety, that somehow connects up with a woman's soul and channels male physical attraction into magical emotional intimacy and commitment. You can see it in Disney films and romance novels, where the hero absolutely never starts by noticing the protagonist's bouncing breasts, but may be magnetically drawn to something spiritual and ineffable about her hair or eyes or posture, which turns out to express some deeply unique feature of her personal character.
I would probably get accused of lying for saying this, but while I certainly don't lack attraction for a woman's curves, the physical feature that makes me feel deep attraction to someone is their facial features. I don't know about "spiritual and ineffable," but a warm smile and deep, thoughtful eyes make my heart melt, and a connection of shared vulnerability gives me butterflies in the chest. Someone once told me I made her "feel like I'm in a romance novel," because I talk that way, and similar statements have been made by other people I've dated. But I'm also well aware my romantic orientation is not typical for men, and I have no clue how I ended up with those feelings. It's one of the biggest mysteries for me.
That said, I would not describe myself as "demisexual," and I have the hardware and software for immediate sexual interest. It's just not something I particularly like acting on, and never have. For me, the romantic and sexual attraction have to happen together -- typically, if I find someone romantically attractive, they have a warm smile or seem smart and kind and radiant, I'll find them sexually attractive at the same time. I will admit that a passionate love affair in which sex occurs early has its attraction. But only because it would mean the passion is so strong and intense that we found ourselves unable to control the sexual tension -- which is remarkably similar to the sexual fantasies that women will sometimes admit to.
I can also find people sexually but not romantically attractive, though that's almost always because they have some personality flaw that I find repugnant and I see no vulnerability to which I can relate. If I find you attractive, and you find me attractive, I will find myself staring into your eyes or fantasizing about what it feels like to hold you close or whether it would feel like being in a whirlwind to kiss you, probably more than I will fantasize about what sex with you would be like. My own experience is that sex fueled by passion is just massively more pleasurable, even in raw, hedonistic terms, than sex divorced from it. It's just hotter.
All that being said -- the male complaint is that men with this attitude are often more shy and reserved, and oftentimes get passed over or not romantically noticed by women. And when they do get noticed, the things they say and do that demonstrate their strong romantic orientation are often seen as fake or dissembling, precisely because men try to fake it to play women. And the orientation is so rare among men that I'm not sure most people believe it even exists. I just don't know why my psychology on this is so unusual, or how I ended up there.
bustr
Excuse me, what-str?
You said you're single. Have you thought about putting your interest in larger women to work?
I didn’t care for Luca much. In general, I think Pixar does best at movies that show “the world within the world”, where there are non-human characters who are related in some way to humans and we see what the “human world” is like from their perspective. Once you notice that pattern, you realize all of Pixar’s best movies fit that pattern.
Toy Story is about toys who have to navigate the world of children playing with them. Monsters inc is about monsters who scare humans, but are deathly afraid of them. Finding Nemo is about fish having to navigate the world of commercial fishing and aquariums. Wall-E is about robots who have to clean up after lazy humans. Ratatouille is about rats navigating an human kitchen. Inside Out is about internal emotions who have to try and regulate themselves to deal with the problems of their host person. (Not actually the first time Disney developed that concept.)
The Incredibles breaks the mold, but I guess it depends on whether you consider supers human or non-human. Regardless, it participates in the same “secret world within the world” trope.
Luca, Brave, Up, Elio, and Coco are the opposite: about humans exploring the inner world. I find that inherently less interesting. Coco is by far the best out of the bunch; day of the dead has such color as a cultural festival, and the idea of an elderly grandmother with memory issues remembering her father is such a raw and poignant human experience that I’m not sure anyone left the theater with dry eyes. Up is pretty loved, but mostly because of the first 20 minutes. I liked Elio more than most people seemed to have; I’m considering an effortpost review since it came up.
Soul and Turning Red (never saw that one) I guess are like that, but less about a world and more about a transformation? Not considered Pixar’s best.
There are also the “non-humans as a human allegory,” like Cars, A Bug’s Life, Onward, Elemental. These are, at best, controversial. I think humans need to be in a Pixar movie, but not as the main characters.
I never saw Lightyear, and I think that was their worst ever concept for a film. I hated that they made a 3d Pixar movie as the in-universe buzz lightyear movie; I prefer the original 2d galactic command TV show. Toy advertisement media is far more silly and zany than a Pixar film.
Pixar is at their best when we get to imagine non-humans “inside” our world and what they might think of us. If I were an exec, I would be demanding that creatives pitch more of those ideas.
However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.
I don't know that this really demonstrates an understanding of what the Indian treaty system does in the United States or its historical context.
It's not about being smug, but the situation in the US is remarkably different from the other Anglo colonies. In US history, the concept of treaties with various tribes developed essentially as a way to take tribes out of their land -- the point was "here's a treaty that gives us your land and requires you to leave it and go towards land we consider less valuable." The point of the treaties was they gave a legal veneer for the goal of conquest: we didn't take the land, they gave it to us fair and square. Sometimes this was better, and sometimes worse; every American kid learns about the Trail of Tears.
It's for that reason that any concept of Indian sovereignty above and beyond simply the tribal governments and their reservation land is dead in the water, though some activists still try. The concept in US law is "dependent nations"; the US government has historically seen Indian tribes as completely subsistent upon US sovereignty, but with special carve-outs that make them similar in some ways to states. The fact that tribes have self-governing is kind of a point in federal power above state power, not so much that tribal governments are massively powerful. Only the national government constitutionally has the right to control Indian affairs and make treaties with tribes.
It's true that in the US there are Indian reparation programs and lots of federal funding. But a lot of this is very token, and doesn't help anyone all that much. And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."
Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country." Because in the American context, such a thing is incoherent. You say that this stuff is the result of importing American culture war into Australia, but as far as I can tell the land acknowledgement stuff in the US, such as it exists, is the exact opposite.
The two big culture war flashpoints for native affairs have basically been "should they be called American Indians or Native Americans?" which among actual Indians is a generational thing; older tribal members prefer "Indian", younger ones prefer "Native American." The other one is more of a culture war flashpoint in Oklahoma, specifically, but a Supreme Court case said that the five tribes of Oklahoma were never disestablished, and angered a lot of non-Indians in Oklahoma. But the point is that Indian sovereignty is limited to the reservations, and this is spelled out and a matter of consensus.
I think the idea that a proper-noun Treaty or some level of self-government for natives is the high-water-mark of native activism is an importation of Australian political categories upon other countries where they're not relevant. Actually, it surprises me that Australia doesn't have any sort of treaty system with aboriginals and the Torres Strait groups, that clarifies sovereignty and makes it clear what the limits of native power are and are not! I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.
I understand that "aboriginals are just like you and me" is the conservative view of Australian politics, and it follows that any political representation for them is controversial. But the US view is that tribal governments exist, and so there's no need for actual political representation for them. The need for Treaty is forestalled by the existence of treaties.
In the US, tribal governments petition the federal government to do things, and maybe they do them, maybe they don't. But there is no widespread call for, say, a congressional seat. Or a "Voice." Their voice is their own tribal government, which is dependent upon the whims of the federal government and sometimes the courts.
So, I think if we're comparing "who is most concerned about native activism in their country," and we look at one where natives have limited autonomy, clearly spelled out territorial limits (in places like the helldirt of New Mexico and the plains of Oklahoma -- "out of sight, out of mind"), and formal dependence upon federal whims, and then one where the government proposed for a public vote the idea of a formal advisory panel for indigenous political activism which even in its most unclear form won 40% of the vote, and natives are sometimes treated as the quasi-spiritual owners of the whole Country with spiritual welcomes that open meetings like a national anthem... yeah, I'm going to go with the first one as the one that cares less.
I felt like the biggest problem with Brave was that it didn't lean fully enough into being a Disney princess animated musical
I actually forgot until I wrote the post and looked at a filmography list that Brave wasn't a princess film made by Disney Animation and not Pixar.
What's particularly odd to me about his essay is that his descriptions of what "normie conservative church girls" are like doesn't ring true to me. It's true that a lot of country women are into burly, hardworking country men. Obviously! But I'm pretty close to his description of an "extremely online neurotic weirdo intellectual", and I've always had an easier time dating "normie conservative church girls" than dating "bohemian art hoes." Who, to be honest, are often more unstable, which the author admits in a comment describes him; like attracts like. The ideal, of course, is "intellectual country girl," and let me tell you, "she is far more precious than jewels."
I'm guessing it was the outright white nationalism, disagreeableness, and evident heterodoxy that made it hard for him, not the fact that he's smart and creative.
It's also really funny when he says this:
People there would get very hostile when I tried to start conversations comparing their region with others where I’d lived, regardless of how polite I was about it.
Considering his ultimate reflections on the Midwest, I'm guessing this conversation was a lot more critical and judgmental than he believes they were, and his interlocutors picked up on it. I take as my evidence for this point the fact that he calls German-Americans "low T" and says that they like smooth brains and not thinking about things, and then has the gall to say, "believe it or not the point of this article isn’t to shit on Midwesterners."
This is a disagreeable man whose default mode is to critique to death everything he sees. Of course agreeable church girls didn't like him!
A Bug’s Life was good, but I think the insect-oriented concept repelled people and it didn’t do well. I don’t consider it one of their best, but I enjoyed it.
I also put Cars in that category, and I do like Cars, but I don’t think it represented the best that Pixar can offer in terms of concept. But it was well-executed, and has attained iconic status, and sells merchandise better than Toy Story! I think if Pixar makes another movie as compelling as Cars, it would be good. Like Coco, it’s a situation where Pixar expressed its creative strength outside its core conceit.
I also forgot about The Good Dinosaur — which even though I’ve seen it I don’t have any idea what it was about.
He may not be a utilitarian, for instance. Both virtue ethicists and deontologists are often sensitive to suffering, but they ground their ethics in a framework where actively minmaxing suffering isn’t the goal. I think reducing suffering is good, but it’s one good goal out of many.
Even Kant had a famous footnote where he argued that not causing unnecessary suffering to animals is an indirect duty to human beings, because harming animals can be a stepping stone to harming humans. See every serial killer’s origin story.
Simply put, “I care about animal suffering” does not imply “I am a negative utilitarian.”
There was a documentary on the tornado in Joplin, MO where someone was visiting the area from California. They were dining at a local restaurant when the sirens started sounding. They were alarmed, but locals around them didn't react and reassured them that "this happens all the time" and wasn't something to be concerned about.
And then the tornado came right through town.
So a lot of locals in weather-prone areas are desensitized to the warnings, even when the klaxons really do go off.
Then again, the opposite can also happen. My father grew up in Kansas, and is the most weather-aware person I know: when I was a teenager/young adult he would always have the forecast memorized. There were lots of "wait, you're going where today? There's severe weather coming in, possible hail." When he learned he could access weather information at any time on his computer, I'm pretty sure it was like a revelation for him.
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
I have an acquaintance from college who transitioned male to female. They once showed me a picture of a neckbeard with acne, saying "this is what I used to look like, then I transitioned and I'm so happy with how I look." Well, no crap my friend, you shaved the neckbeard and started taking care of yourself!
Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime.
Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?
I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it).
In the Tulsa area? Connected to St. Mary’s up in Kansas, I presume?
They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs.
To be fair, this is mostly because they’ve intermarried with white people at high rates, particularly the Cherokee. Basically every white Oklahoman has some story about how great-aunt somebody or other was Cherokee and great-uncle sonofabitch didn’t let her sign up for the tribal roll.
I’m convinced this is mostly grifting — wouldn’t it be so nice if we could get some of that sweet oil casino money? But when Elizabeth Warren’s claims started to come under scrutiny, I never believed them, and I also thought it was really funny how she believed the grifting family legend enough to humiliate herself by taking a DNA test. Her pretendian thing isn’t weird, or unique — she’s just a white lady from Oklahoma.
I have cousins through adoption and marriage who are on tribal rolls. They’re ahem rednecks same as any rural white people.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family.
I thought my girlfriend and I were the most introverted couple out there, but we like going to restaurants and visiting scenic sites. Though I admit, there's a lot of "watch youtube on the couch."
It's interesting that a lot of dating advice is "be attractive" "be extraverted", and introverts have a hard time dating. I wonder at times how introverted women are meeting men. Perhaps the answer is "they aren't"; I have a theory that introverted women make up a majority of the "women going their own way" and not dating. I don't know that I've ever dated, or seriously considered dating, or asked out, a woman I would consider extraverted, and I wonder at times whether this contributed to my limited success back when I was on the market.
I often reflect upon the fact that “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” is one of the curses put upon Eve in Genesis 3.
Many young Christians I know, of various stripes, play DnD. I’m sure there are some boomers still railing against it but millennial and zoomer Christians are generally in agreement that fantasy stories are cool, and fantasy roleplay is a fun hobby.
Now something has to be responsible for the increase in Wicca and various forms of witchery over the past couple decades, but that seems concentrated within new agey women and not the geeky introverts who played DND in the 90s.
It turns out the real problem was the dawning of the age of Aquarius the hippies and their intellectual descendants after all, though I will certainly stand firm on the proposition that occasional atheistic/countercultural men were more than willing to invoke the occult if it meant getting inside some witchy panties.
I think the problem was social conservatives conflated several different countercultural groups who all rebelled against the moral majority, and couldn’t tell the fantasy roleplay apart from the new age cults. This hardened a lot of hearts, which was a shame.
But I still see the spread of witchcraft among women as an unresolved historical question. But I suppose people on the other side would say the same about the spread of conservative Christianity among men. Dissatisfaction with secular materialism is startlingly widespread, a fact I find hard to diagnose despite being a part of it. But if I had to make a diagnosis, perhaps it’s because technology increasingly feels like it limits human freedom rather than enhancing it. (Let’s not start another debate about the automobile or social media.)
The invocation of supernatural forces of any kind becomes a kind of trump (no relation) card that lets people feel like they have control over their lives, or at least have a direct line to someone who does. I suspect that magical thinking and superstition also load on neuroticism, because neurotic people often feel like the world is dangerous and they’re too weak to face it. Supernatural powers serve as a means of personal protection against a world they feel like they cannot control. Occultism spiked during COVID, where people felt like they had little power to control the situation (whether because of state authority or fear of the disease itself). Hence you get people panicking over the election of Trump (relation intended) and trying to trump (no relation) his political power by casting hexes on /r/witchesvspatriarchy.
Sometimes I wonder if being so morally concerned about the occult in the 80s and 90s actually was the cause of increased occultism. It certainly demonstrated that getting into occult things would really piss off conservatives! So if you're a young lady and you hate conservative Christianity, and you want to express in strong terms your contempt for it, well, you might go reaching for the very things they said were deeply wrong. In particular, this might go some ways towards explaining how massively popular these things are among gay people.
Perhaps if conservatives had mocked occultism and superstition the way a lot of skeptics did instead of getting incredibly angry and treating it like a real thing, we wouldn't live in a world where 40% of young women believe in astrology. Mockery and indifference kills ideas; outrage reifies them.
All I ask is that they have the courtesy and common sense to use o3 instead of 4o.
o3 is definitely more capable, but it also has a remarkable ability to hallucinate more believable things, and to communicate ideas in highly technical ways that are hard to understand — and thus fact-check — if you’re not a domain-specific expert. I don’t ask ChatGPT questions about personal medical problems, but when I ask dumb shower thoughts about medical research (“what do researchers think causes Alzheimer’s?” etc) it starts going on about highly technical detail with no introduction or explanation. If it’s right, wow is it smart. But if it’s wrong… I’m not smart enough to know how.
With 4o, I know I’m going to get something overly emotive and excessively buttkissing, but at least I can understand what it’s giving me.
It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body
Sometimes you'll even find evangelicals who misunderstand Christian teaching on the dead -- it's really common among evangelicals to find people discussing how "I won't need my body when I'm gone," or speaking of "Jesus taking me out of this vessel of a body," in a way that reveals they misunderstand the ultimate Christian view of the human person as body and soul and the Christian agreement with the Pharisees on the resurrection of the dead.
Obviously this isn't an indictment of evangelicalism as a belief system -- informed evangelicals are firm believers in the resurrection -- but it just shows how widespread this view is. I also strongly agree with the Orthodox on the point that cremation is just a bad call, because the overall culture of cremation encourages the neglect of the bodies of the dead by making them scatterable and transportable. The proper resting place of human remains is the ground or the crypt, not an urn on a mantlepiece or the ocean or -- God help us -- Disney World.
I'm often startled at how culturally significant the Matrix has been. The sequels weren't all that good, the plot of the original was strange and confusing, and the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better -- but the concept of the colored pills, bullet time, and Laurence Fishburne's performance as Morpheus just made the movie hard to forget. The strange aesthetic made it both confusing and memorable. (Sometimes I think the flaws of Star Wars did the same -- both the OT and the prequels have diehard fans precisely because they were tacky and disjointed. The sequels are so polished, but they're polished like a turd.)
The Matrix definitely sticks out in my memory, but personally I'd rather everyone take the Christpill from Catholic Morpheus.
If being on the motte should teach any one anything, it’s that men often care about female promiscuity as much as if not more than women do.
And most descendents of Borderers have intermarried with descendents of non-Borderers. You simply can't trace most white Americans' ancestry in a clean unbroken line back to specific founding-era groups without lots of intermarriage and interconnection. This is why I find the discussion in some groups about "founding stock" to be inane, I have a large cluster of ancestors who were apparently here before portions of the 13 colonies were even ruled by Britain, and another large cluster of ancestors who came in the 1800s and early 1900s. Most whites are the same.
I fully understand the diversity of my ancestors, and I think picking just one of those and saying "this is me" is very silly. I treasure their stories and what they contribute to my heritage; I have a copy of the original Lutheran hymnal in German that my great-great grandmother owned. But I speak American English, watch American movies, am concerned about American politics and eat American cuisine, I celebrate the Fourth of July and when I stand, I lean. I'm an American, of European descent. Anything more specific is irrelevant.
A further complication is the difference between brand names and generic names. I generally know the names of my prescription medications by the generic name, because that's what the pharmacy prints on the labels. However, every doctor I've ever seen refers to drugs by the brand name (which is usually easier to say).
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