urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
No bio...
User ID: 226
Many mothers believe that becoming and being a mother is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to them.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking about bearing, breastfeeding, and raising a child as a "bare biological function" rather than something that is, yes, biological, but also deeply tied in to people's social, emotional, and spiritual sense of who they are -- in other words, to the elements of life that lead to eudaemonia.
"Eating food" is a bare biological function, but it's loaded with social and spiritual meaning -- think about "who sits at what table" in High School, about dinner dates, about feasts and holidays, about Thanksgiving dinner, about gourmonds who learn to savor every bite, and even think about many ancient religions (including Christianity) where "having a meal with the gods" is the fundamental principle of sacrifice.
Sex, too, is a bare biological function, but think about how many ways in which it has emotional meaning for people: not just as a reinforcement of status (which men experience intensely, and thus see sexlessness as utterly wounding to their value as human beings), but as reinforcement of connection, as a means of bonding, as a means of play, as something more than the sum of its parts.
And into this I have to assert: bearing, feeding, and nuturing a child is about more than biology. It is social, emotional, and spiritual. And many -- though certainly not all -- mothers experience it in just this way. Not as a denial of eudaemonia, but as true eudaemonia, flourishing so flourished that it nutures another being's flourishing. Hail, full of grace!
Fathers experience this too, though to a lesser degree. My girlfriend likes to visit old churches to appreciate the architecture, and a common feature of old churches is the church graveyard. What I have often noted to her is that, on almost all of the graves of men, what it reads is not "high-powered lawyer," or "statesman," or "had a bunch of money," but rather: "Husband and FATHER." The greatest legacy of almost every man and every woman, the great evidence of their flourishing to the world, is not what their career looked like or how aggressively they "chased their dreams," but the children they brought into the world, and the way they nurtured them. Your children, not your coworkers, will tend your grave.
I think maybe this is an agreeableness problem -- your argument here is essentially that women are too agreeable and too neurotic. Sure, neuroticism is always a danger, and both men and women with neuroticism struggle a lot. And women are statistically higher in it. But agreeableness is a strength of women, not a weakness: men's great honor is low neuroticism, but women's great honor is high agreeableness.
It can be hard to see on the motte, where disagreeableness is common, but agreeableness is necessary for the maintanence of society. Not only because it is the necessary lens through which to nurture a child, but because it is the necessary lens through which to care for anyone who needs caring for, and to build systems of social harmony that tie people together, that build and maintain social bonds. We could not live in a society were it not for the social bonds maintained by agreeable women.
Some studies have suggested that, in the general population, people maintain stronger connections with their maternal grandparents than their paternal grandparents. Researchers sometimes argue that this can be attributed to the social bonds maintained by mothers.
I speak from experience here: that rings very true to me. In fact, not only am I closer to my maternal family than my paternal family, but my mother is closer to my paternal family than my father is!
Maintaining social bonds is extremely important; this is how social capital is maintained. Societies where these bonds are not maintained are impoverished by it. As we are, in these days of atomization and rootlessness.
So your lens strikes me as incredibly limited: you're saying that 99% of what's important for the maintanence of society is done by men, while not even fully noting the importance of things that women do. You're asking for what would make women valuable without even acknowledging the value they do have.
While you apologized, the fact that you posted this on mother's day without realizing it was mother's day says quite a lot. Did you not speak to your mother yesterday? Did you spend any time with her? Send her flowers?
Because, for what it's worth, that's what maintaining social bonds looks like. And you devalue it to your own peril.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
27d ago
tindr
A nitpick, but it’s tinder, with an e. Grindr dropped the e — I guess because “grinder” sounds more like a meat processing tool than a dating app. (Not that dating apps don’t grind people up inside!)
Yeah, the feeling is almost like I'm being shocked, it tickles in an uncomfortable way. I don't know enough about fabrics to say what actually triggers it.
I used to be very sensitive to noise. When I first rode on an airplane as a little kid, my mom had to buy some of these earplanes which were made to equalize pressure but also work well to reduce noise. This was back when turboprop planes were still in use at some regional airports in the US.
Well, still am I guess, but it's a lot better. I have to cover my ears during fireworks shows. Which is probably a good thing -- even fireworks explosions sometimes get loud enough that it could damage your hearing.
It's also true that I have a penchant for repetitive fidgeting. I have a box of fidget toys I keep on my desk.
I don't know that autism was ever really suspected, but my mom did have several books on her bookshelf whose titles rounded off to "What To Do If Your Child Is A Weirdo" and my social development was somewhat stunted. As far as I know, I don't have any relatives with either suspected or diagnosed autism. I do have first cousins with OCD, and OCD-like traits would probably explain my excessive concern for contamination and orderliness.
I don't know that I ever met diagnostic criteria for autism, although some people in my life have occasionally suggested it. But it is definitely true that I share some traits in common with high-functioning autism.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d ago
Who was he?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
I apologize for my irritated tone, I just hate when there are such beneficial policies that have been tried and tested in lots of other places, that get shot down for stupid reasons in the US because they threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you.
I agree with you that, in a vaccum, limited cars in cities would be fantastic. I love the way European villages work. I think, as an ideal, cities with strong public transportation and limited congestion are a great place to live. In theory, I'm rah-rah urbanism.
But no discussion of transportation and suburbanization in the US can happen without a co-equal discussion about crime and safety.
The reason Americans cling to their cars and their commutes is simple: the cities are not safe. I personally know people who lived the urbanist dream, living downtown in a city, and then fled to the suburbs because they watched a man die from a gunshot out their window. I've ridden the train and had to make decisions about how to deal with a clearly psychotic man with no understanding of reality, and thus posed a real danger to himself and the people around him. I've seen and walked by the tent cities. I've seen, with my own eyes, the fentanyl zombies whose presence in our greatest cities can be described only as seriously-discomfiting, as human urban blight, as the broken windows of man that reveals and invites immense public disorder and ugliness. I've read the crime stats.
The right perceives this danger profoundly and seriously, and it shapes many of their political priorities, from gun rights to car rights. They want the ability to live without fear, while still being able to have access to the centers of economic activity that are our cities. Having a car means having a physical, metal, lockable bubble that separates you from exterior threats, while being able to easily and autonomously navigate yourself out of the urban center without having to share a means of transportation with people who may mean you harm.
Your post seems to reveal that your concerns about cars are the mirror image of conservative concerns about crime: you see them as dangerous to public safety, and ugly. And you're not wrong! I have serious and real concerns about the size of our vehicles and the number and behavior of them in cities.
But the American right has judged that the danger to them from automobiles -- which indeed is massive, grave, and serious -- is less important to them than the massive, grave, and serious risk posed to them by urban crime and disorder. They would rather be hurt accidentially by a driver than intentionally by a robber. You can find this wrong, or seriously misguided, or silly, but nevertheless it means that their political views on the issue are shaped by actual concerns about the world rather than "advanced car-brain virus." It means that you might have to engage with their concerns realistically, and maybe make concessions, rather than accusing them of harboring a mental parasite. It's much easier to just handwave them away, just as it's much easier for the right to say that anyone with concerns about the Trump administration has a terminal case of TDS.
The urban problems in the US are mostly US-specific, shaped by US concerns. For that reason, your opponents reject that these are beneficial policies based on being tried and tested in other places. The US is not other places, and has unique problems. The US is not Europe, as my liberal friends delight in reminding me.
Left-wingers want to get the cars out of the city, and right-wingers want to get the crime out of the cities. Both have their ebb and flow, as one side of the argument gains more power, but the Democratic strongholds in most US cities ensures that things flow mostly in one direction.
For that reason, Republicans will cling to their cars as a fundamental part of their identity, because it's the only thing that secures them the ability to participate in the economic activity of society while permitting them and their families to live in the suburbs, where they can have greater security for their possessions and families. And where they can offer to their children a chance at an education in a school where bullies and criminals are disciplined, and children aren't smoking weed in the bathrooms -- a real set of concerns expressed by a family who left Oregon to move to the rural, delapidated town in flyover country where my girlfriend grew up. We're actually at the point where it's safer and better for your children to live in bumfuck nowhere than in our most prominent states.
If liberals want conservatives to be hands-off and support restrictions on car culture, the first thing to do is to clean up the cities and make them temples of safety, security, and prosperity. What is needed is to support policies that arrest, convict, and incarcerate (for long periods) drug addicts, criminals, and other beacons of public disorder. In other words, to stop opposing policies that "threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars criminals that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you." Once we keep people who intentionally do harm out of our cities, then we can talk about keeping machines that accidentially do harm out of them.
But until that day: "haha car go vroom vroom."
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
18d ago
So when some socially adept and quite rapacious men figure out that there's an ample supply of idiots out there who just need a meager offering of romance-lit aesthetics and who can't initiate or sustain a real romance from their own abilities, they have no idea of how to approach romance from... well, not exactly an adversarial stance, but at least an active one, where you accept the base fact that life between man and woman (possibly man and man or woman and woman, not much personal insight there) is always a negotiation and you need to stake out your own ground to get what you want.
This is a really long sentence — can you clarify who doesn’t know how to approach a relationship from an adversarial stance?
The core problem seems to be that the assumption is that the man is trying to immediately sleep with the woman and dump her after. So a man who’s persistent isn’t expressing how inexhaustible his passion for this particular woman is, he’s trying to wear her down so he can pump her and dump her.
Or at least that’s the fear, which leads to feelings of disgust at persistence. All it takes are a few experiences of being used and discarded to make someone put up massive guardrails. Heck, men feel terrible at being rejected and it’s easy for that to become resentment and contempt. Men (not all of them!) are perfectly willing to lie to score, and that’s a kind of rejection, too. A woman I was in love with once offered a friends with benefits arrangement when I told her how I felt about her. I felt terrible.
Dating in the courtship model only works when people can trust each other; when they’re worthy of trust. That’s broken down.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
18d ago
Ok, I guess we're taking this seriously as an idea.
If we're speculating about it like this -- I could easily see a humiliation kink developing around self-esteem issues involving math; I've struggled with math since I was in primary school, and despite having a lot of interest in tyical "geeky dude" hobbies like computers and spacecraft, I find math really hard to wrap my head around. I don't think that was bad teaching or anything, I just don't have the aptitude, and it shows up on actual IQ tests because my verbal IQ massively outstrips my performance IQ. So I've always had a bit of a complex about being intersted in lots of things where math is very significant, but finding it really hard to grasp the mathematical concepts that make them work. I could easily see a complex like that becoming a kind of humiliation kink, because being unable to do things that people you respect can do creates a power hierarchy!
This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism
A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic. While autism among the female sex is controversial, I suspect they're correct. I have no data for this, but I think the two greatest risk factors for FTM transitioning are 1) autism and 2) PCOS. I have a friend with PCOS who is a huge fan of Abigail Shirer, and believes that a great number of FTM transitioners are women with the same syndrome -- which is caused by abnormally and dangerously high levels of testosterone in women -- who feel like the symptoms of the condition like male-pattern hair growth and irregular periods make them less of a woman and therefore seek to embrace them as part of their "true self."
This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.
Actual bona-fide gender dysphoria obviously plays its role, although I wonder sometimes if much of it isn't so much active identification with the preferred sex and more a feeling of alienation and incapability to be accepted as a member of their birth sex that emerges into body image issues. That would make it something that social contagion can affect, much as anorexia can take even subtle (or not so subtle) social cues towards physical fitness and thinness and transmute them like a witch into an inability (Edit: originally there was a typo here that was "anability", which is an uncomfortably good phrase to describe the perception problems of anorexia) to accurately perceive the body's actual thinness. Obviously not all cases, but I think transgenderism is a multi-factor phenomenon and this might be one of the factors.
People sometimes conceptualize transitioners as villains or attention-seekers, and sometimes they can be like that, but I strongly believe there's a wellspring of intense suffering that motivates it in many cases, even if we don't have to affirm every decision that someone who is suffering makes or even agree with their interpretation of their experience.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
This is fair, but I would also add that this shifts the incentives for therapists as well, towards mechanisms of therapy that are "easier," or more "humanistic" for patients. The humanistic school announces just what you've outlined as a point of pride:
More than any other therapy, Humanistic-Existential therapy models democracy. It imposes ideologies of others upon the client less than other therapeutic practices. Freedom to choose is maximized. We validate our clients' human potential.
The academics whose studies are always presented as evidence for the effectiveness of therapy almost universally practice strict cognitive-behavioral therapy, which explicitly involves persisting in important activites despite negative feelings, acting on carefully-reasoned directions rather than following emotions, and trying to clearly understand how your actions affect other people. In other words -- exactly what someone whose negative emotions harm themselves or others needs (emphasis mine):
- Human emotions are primarily caused by people's thoughts and perceptions rather than events.
- Events, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiological reactions influence each other.
- Dysfunctional emotions are typically caused by unrealistic thoughts. Reducing dysfunctional emotions requires becoming aware of irrational thoughts and changing them.
- Human beings have an innate tendency to develop irrational thoughts. This tendency is reinforced by their environment.
- People are largely responsible for their own dysfunctional emotions, as they maintain and reinforce their own beliefs.
- Sustained effort is necessary to modify dysfunctional thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
- Rational thinking usually causes a decrease in the frequency, intensity, and duration of dysfunctional emotions, rather than an absence of affect or feelings.
- A positive therapeutic relationship is essential to successful cognitive therapy.
- Cognitive therapy is based on a teacher-student relationship, where the therapist educates the client.
- Cognitive therapy uses Socratic questioning to challenge cognitive distortions.
- Homework is an essential aspect of cognitive therapy. It consolidates the skills learned in therapy.
- The cognitive approach is active, directed, and structured.
- Cognitive therapy is generally short.
- Cognitive therapy is based on predictable steps.
It does strike me as funny that a lot of criticisms of therapy culture you see on the motte and elsewhere are essentially that therapy should be just that -- short, goal-oriented, placing a great deal of responsibility on patients, focused on behaviors rather than emotions, emphasizing change instead of validation. If all therapy were like that, it would be a much better profession!
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
I don't know that the conquest of large sections of the world were really expressions of Christian love, even if Christianity was often invoked as legitimating force and Christian voices often called for temperance in colonial activities in the name of the Gospel (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas).
Ok, you activated an "urquan has too many theological opinions for his own good" moment, but I remember a research project I did for my historiography class in college on Anglicanism in America that gave me a decent answer to this question.
My original question was asking about how American Anglicans on the eve of the Revolution dealt with the idea of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of their Church: the British Monarch. Perhaps this was a silly question to ask, but I seriously wondered how you could deal with the cognitive dissonance of belonging to a church whose governor -- not "head", that's what Henry VIII called himself before someone told Elizabeth that calling yourself "head of the Church" sounds like usurping Jesus Christ -- was the very King you were calling a tyrant. I was aware that many of the Founding Fathers were Anglicans, so this seemed like a fruitful area of study.
I focused my research on Anglicans in Virginia (where several of the Anglican Founders were from) in the 1700s, to narrow in on that question.
And I found that, not only was the exact question "how did the Anglican Founders deal with the cognitive dissonance of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of the Church of England" had never been posed in the historical community, but that actually the subject of intense debate among scholars was the much more alarming question, Did Anglicans in Virginia actually care about their religion at all?
I recall one researcher, who wrote an entire monograph about a specific Anglican lady who had a Bible and a journal where she wrote devotional texts about God. And the researcher treated this like she'd found the Holy Grail -- look, everyone, I found an Anglican woman who seems like she had a heartfelt faith in God! It was a revelation. Stop the presses! We have to rewrite the textbooks! Maybe at least one Anglican in Virginia actually did believe in God!
That underscored to me how serious the rot was in the Anglican Church in America, even back then; it really did seem like Anglicans saw the church as a social club, and took or left portions of their faith as it served their other interests. Actually taking religion seriously just wasn't something in the vocabulary of most Anglicans at the time. That was something for those weird revivalists or those Wesleyans with their method.
Having met some Episcopalians, I really do feel like I can take their approach to faith and just push it back a few hundred years, and get a good sense of the scorn or bewilderment with which their WASP ancestors would have viewed intense religious devotion. Or worse, expelled basing your morals on an unchanging read of the Scriptures instead of just doing what's high-status.
Relevant to the subject of morals, and to the larger topic at hand -- about racism -- many American Anglicans at the time were slaveholders and it was very common for churches to be racially segregated, or for blacks not to be allowed in the church at all. So there's a bit to the Episcopal Church's posture that really is a "we know we were the epicenter of this, we're really sorry."
As far as I was able to discern, in this very limited research project (that included little to no primary source work), the only effect that the American Revolution had on the American Anglican Church was that they changed their name to "The Episcopal Church," to get rid of the whole "Anglo" thing. ("We promise we're good patriots!") Or wait, was it the Protestant Episcopal Church at that time? I think the "Protestant" got nixed at one point because it sounded too much like having a solid theological opinion.
It's also true that a huge number of Loyalists were Anglicans, and so I'm sure if I devoted myself to a more serious investigation of the time period I could find evidence of Anglicans' religious affiliation influencing their views on the American Revolution. Many of these people fled to Canada as it became clear the patriots were winning, so a true telling of the story of Anglicanism in North America (not to be confused with the "Anglican Church in North America", a modern body, that split from Canterbury over gay marriage and is essentially a missionary project of African Anglicans, because as much as Episcopalians like to talk about their tight links to Africa, the Africans think they're apostate for their strong support of SSM) would have to talk about Canada too.
I'm pretty mean to Episcopalians, but really, I guess I'm just as bewildered about them as they would be about me, God bless them.
If you really want to get me started on things that are interesting about Anglicanism, ask me about the Oxford Movement or the "Anglican Continuum." That's where the story becomes fascinating, in both the way that a plane crash and a mathematical equation are fascinating. But you have to find the Anglicans who barely want to be Anglicans before I start getting really interested. (The ACNA people I mentioned above are continuing Anglicans, they're trying to be more Anglican than the Anglicans, and some of them ordain women. Confessional Protestantism in America has had two big waves of schism, once in the 60s-70s over women's ordination and now in the past 10-15 years over gay marriage, and I'm sure at this point all the Catholics and Orthodox in the audience are going "man am I glad we have The Tradition.")
All that to say -- I think Anglicans ~300 years ago had all the seeds of their present situation already planted, in British America more than in Britain. Anglicanism to me has always seemed like the Church of the Compromise rather than a church with a strong set of beliefs, and the American Anglican Church was so eager to compromise with the prevailing winds that they changed their name to obscure their origins. There's an old quip of Oscar Wilde that seems apropos: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do."
In that sense I don't see their collapse into social liberalism as particularly surprising, in the way that I find the descent of mainstream Presbyterianism and Methodism (which, to be sure, was an Anglican revival movement at first, though it's always had a more independent nature in America) surprising, given the history of those churches in firm confession and rigorous devotion. But I'm sure that's another story for another time, one that you're no doubt more well-equipped to tell than I am.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
If the argument you’re making is “less than 100% of marriages are worthwhile,” I think that’s completely uncontroversial. If the argument is “100% of marriages are not worthwhile,” then I think that’s wrong.
It sounds to me like you’re intending to say the first, but the way you put it at first — “I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife” — implies you mean the second. People are bringing up their own marriages to argue against the second, while you’re defending the first. I think an unintentional motte and bailey has been set up, just because of a lack of clarity in the discussion.
But the big difference in views I think I see is that the “wife guys” are arguing for marriage through the concept of companionate love: “she’s the best part of my day, she makes my life meaningful,” etc. You’re talking about it in terms of economic and sexual utility: “I could have sex with any woman, and get assistants to do things around the house I don’t want to do.” If that’s what the utility of a marriage consists of then of course Bezos doesn’t need it! But if marriage includes an intimate relationship of growth in and with the other person, then it’s no wonder at all why Bezos would throw such a lavish wedding if he believes he’s found someone he can have that with. He can be right or wrong about the particular woman he made that choice with (like he apparently did with the first one), but it’s not straightforwardly stupid.
People are bringing up their own marriages to insist that this kind of companionate love is possible in the long term, even if all or even most marriages don’t live up to it. They’re protecting the concept of a pair-bond.
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition. I had one friend from high school who had a bunch of dating struggles as a lesbian (I'm not sure dating women is easy for anyone), and then started flirting with pronoun changes. A not-entirely-small portition of these end up starting to date men after transitioning, too, becoming convinced that in doing so they would be engaging in the gayest, queerest, most countercultural form of sex. Of course, I'm talking about PIV intercourse.
(T is a hellava drug.)
I've also heard of, though never met, "FTM femboys," who as far as I can tell are women who transition to men who dress as women, which is again a bizarre way to arrive at basically heterosexuality. I realize that the femboy thing is distinct from femnininity proper -- try calling a trans woman a femboy and see how it goes -- but at some point the irony and the flip flopping just goes so far that I can't even entertain the logic.
urquan
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1mo ago
I only mean that she attended a "non-denominational" Christian (is that an oxymoron?) church in the area
Ah, that does mean evangelical. Almost universally, “non-denominational” means “Baptist in denial.” Sometimes with more charismatic influence than is typical of Baptists. It would be absolutely no surprise to me for a pro-choice feminist to have a falling out with such a congregation over gay marriage, as those congregations are typically conservative doctrinally even if they’re experimental liturgically and ecclesiologically. (And congregational autonomy isn’t even a strange idea for evangelicals.)
That also draws into relief why she felt her religion was either/or — one characteristic of many non-denominationals is a general ignorance of forms of Christianity outside the evangelical orbit, so the concept of an institutional Christianity that is somewhat, well, woke would be unfamiliar. That also makes her pathway more clear to me; she brought the non-denominational emphasis on spiritual autonomy, raw authenticity, and emotional intensity to her politics, with disastrous results.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
What helped you improve your functioning? (I realize that’s a very personal question.)
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time.
The credentialist thesis is that the function of college in society is to demonstrate the ability of a person to perservere doing boring work and run to completion a program that requires multiple years of effort. Both of which are important capacities for an employee.
I recall that psychometrics can't find a way to measure someone's industriousness and ability to perservere doing hard work except by asking them, or by actually observing their behavior over a long period of time. We don't have a "hard-worker" test the way we have an IQ test. So college operates as the best thing we have to attest to a person's capacity for sustained effort, and it throws in an IQ-loaded element and the ability for young people with little experience to make connections with people who have lots of knowledge or experience in a specific field.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1mo ago
It's understandably hard to find someone who will swear "for better or worse" if they fear "for better or else" in return.
At some point, it just seems strange that you'd even want a marriage after developing such a firm opposition to lifelong vows, based on experience with many failed marriages. Why not just have a succession of long-term relationships? Isn't that what your worldview would suggest is the healthy model for relationships? Her post quite evidently states her belief that there is no real continuity of obligation between the past and the present:
But the exclusivity choice was made by their past self, decades ago- a different person, to a different woman, and I can’t help but wonder if they would make that same choice if they knew what they were getting into.
Under those conditions, why get married at all? It's a commitment to a person who -- by her own statement -- disappears, ceases to exist, over time. That's a worldview where marriage doesn't even make sense as an option.
The problem with marriage is increasingly people seem to be treating it as a time-limited commitment: "we'll be together until we decide we don't like it any more, and then divorce." But our legal system is set up based on the older model where marriage is supposed to be truly life-long, and the two really are supposed to have a joint legal identity in a way that makes everything each partner does common property. So, we end up with bitter divorces, vengeful custody disputes, alimony battles.
Not everyone agrees that marriages are made by God to join two together into one flesh -- but without controversy, marriages are made by the state to join two together into one mass of property. The resulting dissolution can only be described as a form of twin-separation surgery, which always leaves damage. What therefore the state has joined together, let not man put asunder.
It really is no wonder to me why so many millennial-and-younger couples are cohabiting, without marrying. They're not in a social and mental context where holding to marriage as a true indissoluble commitment is thinkable, but marriage as it exists on the books imposes costs and consquences that revolve around that kind of commitment.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
There was some real idiocy in thinking we could separate out the emotional components of sex from the act itself.
I can understand why the free love guys back in the 60s thought this was a compelling idea, but what I will never understand is how huge numbers of women were convinced by it.
Finally, at least one Crimson headline writer and one cartoonist have suggested that I am anti-Semitic. I regard anti-Semitism, like all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry, as a crime against humanity and whoever calls me an anti-Semite will face a libel suit.
Public writers who threaten critics with a libel suit (especially for an evaluative claim like “is an anti-Semite”) always rub me the wrong way. It just seems pathetic, like running to teacher because someone called you a doo-doo face. The cost of having a following for your thoughts is that someone’s going to misinterpret them. If you can’t take that heat, stay out of the kitchen.
I also feel like it’s a lack of humility — if you’re offering up a radical take on race, someone’s going to find serious issue with that. Maybe they’re misinterpreting you. But the cost of a radical reinterpretation is that the people who rely on the mainstream one will find it intensely offensive. Of course you’re going to get called nasty things! You can wear that as a badge of honor, or shriek about it. Only one of those makes you look like a person with the intellectual humility required to actively argue for a radical take.
But I know moderates who strongly oppose a lot of the trans stuff but are firmly in support of gay marriage. Have people with this viewpoint just flipped away from identifying as Republican en masse?
Looking at the Gallup data, independents don’t show much of a change. My supposition is that a lot of moderate Republicans have left the party since 2020, leaving more firm conservatives. I’m not convinced this change is due to a massive number of people changing their minds.
Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love.
Sure! But love is very rarely 'at first sight' and even more rarely 'at first sight' in a way that is totally requited. You have to have a base of initial attraction, interest, and liking for love to blossom. Seeing romance as something that just falls out of the sky and immediately demands passion from both sides is actually a big part of the problem -- it usually doesn't!
I'm as big an advocate for romantic love as can possibly be conceived, but I'm also a realist. Young people aren't falling in love not because they're "lecherous, materialistic creeps," but because they learn to silence the impulse based on frequent rejection or messaging that, as you do, tells them that "the worst thing she can say" isn't "no thanks," but "you're a creep!" As it turns out, people are responsive to operant conditioning and social messaging.
If I understand him correctly, @RandomRanger is talking about people not even getting to the stage where love can develop. That's the problem.
People need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable.
No.
I disgree with you on veganism, but I don't go around calling you "vegan-brained."
I was giving reasons why people feel the way they do about cars, and instead of engaging with them seriously, you're name-calling. You can make the argument that cars are net-bad, but that would be a serious discussion that engages seriously with the value differences (for instance, the core of my post -- that people are more concerned about intentional than accidental violence) between you and the "car-brained" rather than calling them names. There's a serious balance to be struck, and I'm sympathetic to the needs of people who would prefer not to drive a car particularly in cities, but there are real, serious concerns people have about the security of public transit. Your post amounts to calling car drivers big babies whose concerns are entirely in their head, and totally disregarding their values and interests, and that strikes me as quite similar to the ad hominem attacks you were upset about earlier. Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them biased -- or wrong. (Doesn't make them right, either.)
I'm actually robustly pro-public-transit, and even sympathetic to the aims of ultimately reducing cars in cities. I just believe that the safety concerns about our cities are more real than you do -- we have a factual and values disagreement, and we should be able to discuss them reasonably without one side accusing the other of being insane, or stupid. I'm not pro-car -- I'm anti-crime, and pro-autonomy. Perhaps I didn't communicate that effectively enough.
On the topic of this being an AAQC -- I would agree this wasn't really one of my better posts; I actually think my response to you was a much better reflection of my values than this one, though I believe the best motte posts are those that offer a take that reveals what a worldview looks like from the inside, as I believe this one does. It's definitely true that my AAQCs have leaned towards the moments where I'm more partisan, or firmly opinionated, and less where I'm diplomatic or synthesizing, which is a fair critique of the AAQC system.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
My understanding is that, in addition to the physical component of masochism (some people really do find pain pleasurable -- maybe it's to do with mild endogenous painkillers released?), much of the interest in submission among people who swing that way is about surrendering control and shutting off your brain, just like you say. Humiliation is probably something else entirely. And frankly my politically-incorrect view is that people with humiliation kinks are people who truly believe they're inferior in some way and believe being placed in a situation where it's called out is just revealing and acknowledging a reality they already fear is true.
There’s so much there, and it’s so rich and dense with detail, but I find myself noting one thing in particular — every relationship dispute you describe there concentrates around sex.
Given that Lana has had fallings-out with both a man and a woman over sex, is it possible that she just has a very low sex drive, and believed this to be indicative of lesbianism even though it might actually mean she’s just not very sexual towards anyone? “Well that jerk only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.” “Well that hoe only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.”
Maybe she doesn’t really want to have sex with anyone, but attributed it to male perversion, or something, which the lesbian falling-out gives the lie to?
The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors. I argue that this makes it strictly worse for the people who go there feeling hopeless — the median post gets almost no responses because the rules are so strict no one wants to reply, and the responses someone does get are very vague, non-specific, non-judgmental and therefore useless. There’s no authenticity in it. You might as well talk to ChatGPT.
When you say she’s (or was?) a “religious Protestant” — what do you mean by that? Because it strikes me as very odd that she would hold the views she did and be a member of an evangelical church. I know of feminist evangelicals in that mould, but I always think of them as people who are simply in the process of leaving, as Lana eventually did. I find it shocking that she wouldn’t be able to find a home in the mainline Protestant world, where her views are extremely common! And I wonder if perhaps the extremity of her behaviors reflects the zeal of an evangelical-to-agnostic convert, a type with which I am very familiar. But perhaps she was mainline, which would make this moot and frankly make her behavior and the opposition of the church (the mainlines couldn’t enforce sliced bread remaining sliced even if they tried) even more concerning.
A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God. If tolerance comes from anywhere, it comes from understanding in humility that you may be wrong; and that others, in their humility, may also be. And that neither of you may — I say “may” here advisedly — be wicked and perverse for your error, but simply human.
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