urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
it should be based on something recognisable and draw from the truth even in exaggeration.
The "recognizable" thing is all the media pieces talking about Trump "being in bed with dictators." And the point for people who believe in that is they believe Trump will allow the dictators to attack, and the idea that the US will actually attack is the humorous exaggeration that "draws from the truth" as the people who like the meme understand it.
I agree it's not a good meme, I'm not saying it is, this is not an apologetic. But it doesn't make literally 0% sense to me, I have enough understanding of the point of view behind it that I get what they're saying and why they're saying it, despite disagreeing with great intensity.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit.
With mass media and the internet, there are people like anything in every place, just in different proportions. I come from a red area of a red state, and yet there are many progressives here -- I was one, when I was a high schooler. And I've known a great many feminists terrified of Trump who were born and raised here. I've even known women who somehow fit in their brains both evangelicalism and feminism: my favorite was the woman who was obsessed with feminism and railed against the patriarchy, but wouldn't date me (despite straightforwardly saying she wanted to) because, at the time, I was an atheist. Modernity is a funhouse mirror.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
To add to @SubstantialFrivolity's point, the message is that Trump's slightly less hawkish attitude towards the war in Ukraine will effectively lead to a massive defeat for Ukraine in the war. There's also the implication that Trump is less hawkish on Ukraine because he's literally in bed with dictators (a phrase you'll often see in American media), meaning that he actually loves and supports Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-Un. The idea is that Trump will align himself with Russia and China and North Korea, and maybe even take actual steps towards allowing Russia to conquer Ukraine, China to conquer Taiwan, and North Korea to conquer South Korea. Hence why those are the flags on the small balls being attacked by Russia, China, and North Korea joined by the United States.
It's not a good meme, and its message is ludicrous, but it's a memetic distillation of what warhawk Americans in the media think Donald Trump believes. Or perhaps more accurately, what their propaganda is intended to communicate.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
Are boomers actually moving sites? I figured they were still on Facebook.
Absolutely. My Trump-booster boomer aunt and her Xer daughter were on facebook, quickly realized Gab was just a bunch of loons, were on Parler for a while, I'm sure they have Truth Social now. These are red tribers from the red tribe, from a small town in the middle of flyover country.
The internet is real life now. Even the boomers have realized that.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
Yes, that's absolutely correct.
But the association persists in people's minds. There was a youtube comment (bottom of the barrel, I know) that I saw which absolutely flabbergasted me. Who knows who the person who said it was, whether male or female, whether Western not, or whether they just weren't another 13 year old let loose on the internet posting silly takes. But they said:
Getting married is so expensive, there's no way young people can do it!
And then a thousand comments in response going, "what the hell are you talking about, marriage reduces your costs because you're sharing expenses!"
In subsequent comments, the person made it clear they weren't talking about wedding costs or honeymoons or anything dumb like that, they honestly believed it was more expensive for two people to live together than to live separately.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers (despite disagreeing with them). And I'm going to disagree with you today about needing more compassion for people who are lonely or anxious about politics.
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so.
I'm not worried about people who don't want kids not having them. More power to them.
I am exceptionally worried about people who are lacklove and lonely becoming depressed, atomized, and suicidal, because I care about human flourishing and I couldn't give one iota of a damn about what what "evolution thinks" should happen to them.
There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there that I find, well, inhuman. Maybe even evil. I'm going to be honest with you: what you've said strikes me as the sort of thing I'd expect a rogue AI or alien or demonic creature trying to maximize suffering would say.
Because it just so happens that some who walk the earth with us are one of these organisms that are "unable to reproduce... and rightly so." I'm not just talking about the young men who will remain lonely if this movement takes off, but about the young women themselves, people who are clearly neurotic and anxious and scared and desperately need someone to tell them that it's going to be ok, and hatred and resentment will just drive them deeper into loneliness and sorrow. There is nothing "right" about people being lonely, depressed, and terrified because their social environment has distorted their view of reality.
It's rather odd that you'd write:
Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright.
just as we're discussing people who desperately need to hear that exact message. If you can make a difference in people's minds by saying this with regards to one worry, it stands to reason you can make a difference in the minds of the people under discussion -- and therefore perhaps there is something "you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way."
I'm reminded a little about that famous quote from Alexander Pope: "Whatever is, is right," that Leibnitzian saying that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And I'm going to counter you with the view that not only the 4B people but the Christian people and the Muslim people and the new Atheist people and the progressive people and the conservative people disagree with you, and they disagree with you profoundly, at the core of their being. This world is fallen, less than it could be. And I take hope in the fact that, despite our disagreements, many people believe that we are not beholden to the origin of our nature or the vicissitudes of evolution as to the outcome of our existence.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
"If you were capable of keeping your legs closed, abortion would not be your top 1 issue"
This is a good line, but it fails the ideological turing test.
An interesting dynamic is that some of the strongest advocates for abortion access are women who have never and would never get an abortion. The view, which I do find at least somewhat sympathetic, is that it's necessary to maintain access as a bodily autonomy measure. This becomes particularly significant in the case of conceptions due to rape, which are indeed rare, and most everyone agrees are deeply tragic and awful.
It's precisely the fact that many of these people believe abortion is rare that they believe it's necessary to preserve access to it. "Abortion is so rare, and only used in tragic cases: why are you insistent on banning something to save 30 lives, even if we assume you're right about fetal personhood? Are you just trying to control women?" Actual knowledge on the frequency, stated reasons, and racial statistics of abortion is often rare among young white women like the people who are leaning into 4B.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness
This is just thrown out there in the article, but this is massively important, the most significant consequence of what's being discussed.
"Women have decided to swear off men, which will lead to expressions of deep loneliness for both men and women" is a terrible outcome. It's people choosing to take actions that steer them and others into profound unhappiness.
In Korea, you can understand why people might make that choice: better unhappy alone than unhappy being a servant of the mother-in-law. But in the US, I hold that this is people choosing to avoid something that would be profoundly meaningful to them out of intense, neurotic fear that their partner might not be an angel. This is making the perfect the enemy of the good, and thus destroying all the good.
Amadan said this:
[Korean women] all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.
This is the key difference between Korea and the US: in Korea women wish they could have fairy-tale romances but expect marriage to be hellish. In the US, however, women wish they could have fairy-tale romances and damn well expect this is what they're going to get. Korean women know what they're in for. American women, like American men, have swallowed all sorts of messaging about fairy-tales and then subsequently find their dating life to be disappointing, because it's not perfect. American perfectionism and hedonistic optimizationalism destroys everything it touches, like a metastatic cancer or a radiation burn.
But I disagree with him on this: something like the 4B movement is already going on among young women in the US already, albeit not explicitly politically. A huge chunk of women are simply uninterested in sex, dating, relationships, marriage, the whole sheboodle (or rather she-not-boodle). I've dated women like this. Didn't go well. I've certainly met many more; rates of explicit asexual identification have skyrocketed among US women. I don't know about political lesbianism, but practical asexualism seems predominant.
I'm agnostic on the cause, I don't know if men just aren't striking them as interesting any more, or if mass-media is just too satiating with its parasocial relationships (see Tumblr shipping and fandom), or if there's some kind of endocrine dysfunction (I genuinely worry there might be one affecting both men and women -- we're turning the frogs gay), or if incentives towards focusing on careers are just so great... but it's alarming. We have a whole generation of lonely men who can't get a date, and lonely women who don't seem to have any inclination towards resolving their loneliness.
There was one of the tiktoks about 4B going around, that featured a young women who said something like "I haven't dated for 4 years, I'm happy, and I'm fine swearing off men for the future." I don't know why this woman who was already off the market seems to think a permanent pledge is worthy of a video, but ok, sure! But really, this is just women politicizing something they were already doing. If it weren't Trump, it would be something else.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
That was a big part of it, but maybe another part was it seems like it requires a few doses and lots of people are afraid of needles and want to minimize the number to just the bare essentials (an underappreciated element of vaccine opposition). I was too old by the time it became common, so HPV was never folded into my normal course of vaccination. I'm fairly pro-vaccine, so if I thought my monogamous self would benefit from it I would have consented. But then it became, "well, now I have to talk to my doctor about my lack of sexual partners, do I really want to have this conversation to get a shot that's not even marketed for my protection?"
Really, the fact that the HPV vaccine is marketed as protection from promiscuous sex is a bad, bad strategy because it pushes culture war buttons. But maybe that's the only reason at all it has any value. Does the HPV vaccine provide any protection against the many other kinds of HPV infections people can be exposed to, like warts on various parts of the body and things like that?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
My hope is that the vibe shift can be helped along by people like me showing up in such spaces, proving we don’t have horns, and making a common-sense case against the more radically stupid positions that the “smart center” might be ready to jettison. Having such an easy and clearly-delusional foil in this scenario was helpful for me!
I just... don't have high hopes for this. Maybe some people on Bluesky would be shifted by it. But I think it's far more likely you'll just end up banned, or ostracized, or ignored.
I'd come away from such a discussion feeling terrible, like I'd poked some bear or strange man woman. Not because I think these people have any concrete way to harm me, but simply because I find debating things with mean-spirited people to be upsetting, a net-negative for me even if I were to be anointed by God as angels sing and get a call from the President of the United States congratulating me on my great debating skills while everybody claps. If it strengthens you, that's great. I guess it's just a personality difference.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
No, that’s not just padding out the word count: the two things you’ve said are not equivalent.
In particular, now you’re actually discussing the values, beliefs, and arguments behind your position, which is a dramatic difference from “all my opponents are dummy dumbs”.
And actually stating plainly your values means that people who are actually smart can now productively disagree with you: maybe someone can go “actually the production function of medical goods doesn’t work like that,” or “maybe tort litigation isn’t actually all that unfair,” or “it’s actually not that difficult for the average consumer to make an informed decision about the expected utility of a medical intervention” — and then what you’ve got is an actual discussion that can illuminate both sides!
And even if you’re right about 100% of your claims, the way you stated it before didn’t make you sound right: it made you sound like a bully relying on thought-terminating cliches. Someone whose arguments are well thought out and informed by evidence doesn’t need to act like that. Providing evidence, discussing trade offs, and engaging in constructive debate is what smart and credible people do. Calling people stupid is just, well, stupid.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
“The people who disagree with me are stupid” is massively uncharitable, and well below what I expect of this place. That’s a stereotype of boo outgroup, and you’re saying it to the very word.
There’s a lot about what you’re saying that’s right! But you don’t seem to have understanding of the reasons people are critical of big pharma, and instead are just calling them dumb. It’s exactly the fact that people who criticize these things are immediately called every insulting name in the book that makes them become distrustful, resentful, and vengeful.
Are you trying to move past shady thinking here, or are you more interested in dunking on your outgroup? It would be much more productive to try and engage with what @Primaprimaprima said and develop a greater understanding of where your opponents are coming from — that will make you much better at being able to be both compassionate and convincing.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
Is he better in longform? Maybe this is just “twitter brings out the worst in people.”
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
meritocracy
Oh god, please don't bring up this word with OP, we're about to get a lecture about how meritocracy necessarily means open borders to high-talent immigrants, even if it means economic ruin for existing residents...
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
Unironically the most interesting thing about this dataset is it sorts "Web Developer" into "IT" and not "Engineering." I have no doubt many flame wars could be fought over that one.
And the second most interesting thing is that the most Republican professions work with fossil fuels, and the most Democratic professions work against fossil fuels. Forget about Black Lives Matter, the divide between the left and the right seems to be about Black Gold.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
Bombastic language aside, I think what's actually being stated is the problem of evil. And I agree it's a serious objection, though it's not one I personally struggle with.
Additionally, I think the gnostic comment wasn't directed at you, but more generally at the concept of religion grasping for answers to the problem of evil that can seem bizarre or improbable. It can be surprising, but the congenitally irreligious often find it hard to distinguish between the various tenets of faiths: they all glom together as one gurgling mass of irrationality. What's the difference between Nicene Christianity and gnosticism to someone convinced that the supernatural is an invented cope?
Before engaging in protracted apologetics, I would invite you to consider that your interlocutor has gone on record that he prefers a child rapist to a man whose worldview he found insufficiently nihilistic, and judge your likelihood of a productive exchange accordingly.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
This change is really weird to me, as someone from the heart of “you guys” territory. I had a lot of progressive friends in school who always said “you guys.” They didn’t think of it, it was just what people said, not something anyone needed to police.
They also weren’t the wokest of the woke I knew, so maybe the others were into it.
But if we’re going to pick a gender-neutral plural you, I nominate “you’uns”.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
Yeah, the Republican women in my life are having the same sort of confused reaction, going “wait, they think that them choosing not to have unprotected sex is some kind of strike against the pro-life movement?”
But the framing is that the point behind pro-life advocacy is the goal of controlling and impregnating women. Fuentes and the teenage boys doing teenage boy things aren’t helping. But the fact that there’s a significant part of the population that’s going “wow, Fuentes is really showing us what the right is really like” instead of realizing he’s a shock jock provocateur who’s intentionally trying to troll indicates just how ingrained this interpretation is on the left.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
Yeah, the point with the rape comments on video games is that it’s considered low-status and inappropriate even by the low standards of teenage boys. Those kids were always considered to have anger issues, no one actually defended them. It’s the softer and more playful ribbing that’s normal for well-adjusted men.
I also think it comes with a side of “I’ve cucked your dad.” And the point of the cuckold meme isn’t that someone raped your wife, it’s that someone was so charming and superior to you that she couldn’t resist your charm.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
This is an earnest question: could you clarify this? I'm confused what exactly you're saying the field was cleared of and what it is they cared about.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
You know, I planned to write a comment that disagreed with you, but after looking into it, I've come to agree with you quite a lot. While there is a big gender gap, the more significant gap continues to be the racial gap. (But the gender gap among Latinos and African-Americans was particularly large -- no wonder Obama came out to try and get black men to vote for Harris!)
The real battle of the sexes story always seemed to me to be the success of Trump among younger men (older men and women were already locked-in): men 18-29 overall voted for Trump slightly more than Harris (49-47%), not just white men, but all of them together. Young women broke massively for Harris, though, 61-37%.
But then I dug a little deeper.
White men 18-29 voted 63%-35% (!) for Trump, white women 18-29 were split 49-49 (also a !). This should mollify all of us a little bit -- from media coverage you'd expect that young white women voted for Harris 80-20, but the reality is they were split down the middle. I'm fascinated by these young women -- where are they? Why aren't we hearing more from them? Would they have also shaved their heads if Harris had won? Perhaps there's hope for the younger men dumped by their girlfriends over voting for Trump after all. God bless America. 🇺🇸
I continue to believe there's some dark force out there trying to get men and women to hate each other. Ginsberg and Scott did very well appropriating the ancient Carthaginian demon, maybe there's some other evil creature whose name we could apply to the feminism-redpill-abortion-Tinder-FDS-Fuentes-industrial complex? Whatever it is, we need to kill it.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
I'm sorry this happened. How are you doing?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
Yeah, sometimes that is the case, depending on the structure and personalities of the friend group. What I've outlined is how it tends to be in my own friend groups, which have been very nerdy, and tended towards playfulness and silliness rather than combativeness and dominance-testing.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6mo ago
That's an intense history. I have a lot of sympathy for all the roles you've had to fill simply as part of IT administration. It was hard to follow certain elements of what your daily tasks were, but from what I could gather, it seems crazy how much access to protected health information you seem to have had. I would expect that HIPPA information would have been plugged into opaque databases a long time ago -- guess I have a lot to learn about healthcare bureaucracy!
The reluctance of clinical personnel to work with the systems was also somewhat surprising, particularly how many decided to quit rather than adapt. Do you think this was because they were nearing retirement, the systems were non-standard for the industry and so they decided to leave for greener pastures, or because working at a community mental health clinic was a tough position and the change in systems was the straw that broke the camel's back in pushing them to get a better job?
For all of their limitations, side effects, and potentially inflated prices, drugs are absolutely, positively the best bang for the buck treatment of mental illness at the community and society level. They provide relief from pervasive states of consciousness and a stability that clients simply cannot achieve without them. Unfortunately, I believe any greater outcome for any given individual would require that magical "willingness to change" that is, all too often, limited to nonexistent.
And this is why I don't agree with the legal reasoning in O'Connor. When we're talking about mental illnesses that make people unable to discern reality or care for themselves, we're talking about a population that, to put it bluntly, needs to be made to take their medication. Chronic moderate harm, not simply imminent bodily harm, to the individual and to society is far more damaging than we give it credit for. Every time I see the homeless beggar on the corner who can't control his movements, I feel that we've done a great deal of wrong to him and to all of us by letting him live on the street like an ancient leper and not putting him in an institution that can guarantee him a warm bed and a set of pills.
That being said, there are lots of reasons why people don't take their medication, the most sympathetic being that many antipsychotics come with all sorts of uncomfortable side effects, as you might expect for a class of drugs that mucks around with the dopaminergic system. Tardive dyskinesia seems horrible. But we can solve this problem with better drugs, and in the meantime the tough situation is that it's better for the patient and for everyone else if we keep them in touch with reality.
I ran into the same problem with a post last week. Still have no idea how to manually type tildes without triggering strikethrough.
More options
Context Copy link