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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   24167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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I think I'm expressing majority feelings about this.

I really hope you're not. "Don't beat up little children" shouldn't be controversial IMO.

Would you beat the snot out of a little girl for being nasty to your son, or is this treatment reserved purely for penis-havers?

Yeah and it's OK that we recognize gendered solutions are appropriate. If a man in a social setting is being aggressively unpleasant you will threaten to hit him and then follow up on it, if a woman is doing the same you will call her an annoying bitch and that everyone thinks she's fat and ugly - it will inflict roughly equivalent damage.

Firstly, beating somebody up i.e. violently assaulting them is not equivalent to calling them a bitch, and I cannot take seriously a frame that considers otherwise.

Secondly, re: gendered solutions, please see my response to @hydroacetylene. If you are willing to apply your 'gendered solutions' fairly, then fair enough. If, however, you advocate for maximum harshness against men while chickening out whenever it is time to apply your 'gendered solutions' to women, then from the recipient's POV that is ultimately indistinguishable from straight-up hatred of men and I'm not going along with it.

Your desire to reframe the issue in your favour suggests that I am more correct than you are comfortable with admitting (Beat up becomes violently assault, "Call a bitch" instead of "Verbal assault, harassed and bullied). These are roughly equivalent because they likely cause temporary harm quickly, and don't have much lasting effect, a quick "Smarten up" if you will.

it will inflict roughly equivalent damage.

no

Definitely. If you scale physical and mental harm either linearly or on some sort of curve, these are within 1 rank of eachother at the furthest (and I think roughly equivalent)

5: murdered

4: permanently maimed (legs amputated, blinded)

3: injury with long recovery (broken hip, ruptured tendon)

2: injury with short recovery (sprained wrist, strep throat)

1: painful injury with no loss of function (slapped very hard, wasp sting)

0: nothing

5: total pariah (exiled, stripped of all social status)

4: fired and shunned (harvey weinstein, permanently life and livelihood altering, sam bankman-fried)

3: humiliating disruption (acrimonious divorce, demoted and forced to change careers, star wars kid?)

2: mild in length or severity of mockery (that lawyer who couldnt turn off the cat-effect on his zoom trial, a local clergyman leaves his microphone on while he uses the toilet)

1: typical bullying (a schoolmate who calls you a fag every week, mean-spirited gossip)

0: nothing

both of these are clearly in the 1-2 zone at worst. Obviously the world is very large and people have different goals, social realities, pain tolerances etc. But I'm quite confident in my assessment. By a week or 2 your bruises from your beating will heal, and everyone will forgot about the party where you got called a fat-slut and ran out crying.

another way: if two hundred people go in queue and each breaks one bone, he/she is probably dead, but if two hundred people go in queue and insult you, it's not that worse; you can even be elected POTUS afterwards.

Very true, owing to the fact that some major bone breaks like your hip and spine have extremely high mortality rates. That's why they're up in rank 3. If you were humiliated or ostracized in a severe way like job loss, divorce, family disruptiion 200 (or 40) times in a row you would probably kill yourself or at least spiral into an unrecoverable depression. In any case I don't think this scale works very well for "stacking debuffs", but 200 people giving you constant low-level (something that individually or a half dozen times wouldn't phase me or you at all) antagonism is what drives most teenagers to kill themselves I imagine.

Just because you can assign star ratings to them doesn't mean they will be equivalent. Many injuries, even minor, lead to permanently worse functiioning level.

Those are numbers, not stars, but your objection doesn't disprove anything I said. It's nearly a non-sequitur.

While I think your argument largely makes sense, I would choose being called a "faggot" over being punched hard in the stomach 1000 times out of 1000

Like it's not even a question I have to think about, the answer is so obvious.

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