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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.

Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.

I think your entire premise is wrong. People don't generally assume that someone who is unsuccessful with romantic relationships is lacking in moral virtue. That might be the case, but there are many other explanations: he's terrible at dating, he has unrealistic standards, he just doesn't put himself out there enough, he has some baggage that becomes evident once a woman shows interest (not necessarily the same as "lacking in moral virtue"), or he has so convinced himself that he's undateable (because he's short) that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes, there are men (and women) who try and try and fail and never find love. That's very sad. But it's never because of any one thing (like height).

When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue.

Look dude, ima be honest. You've been banging this "Short men can't land anyone but a morbidly obese hag" drum for a while now, to the point that you've actually been warned about giving it a rest. It's tiresome, and when you refuse every bit of advice that's been given to you, starting a top-level thread to pose it as a "general question" about why short men who can't get dates are treated so unfairly, it's no less tiresome.

This post is... okay, I guess. If it were anyone else posting it, it would be fine. But seeing your name, I immediately knew what the post would be about before reading it. So seriously, give it a rest. Yes, consider this an invocation of the single-issue posting rule.

It's not just short guys. I'd argue it's the invisibly disabled and essentially those that look at least decent on paper. The physically disabled and deformed get a different but somewhat adjacent kind of bullshit.

Without any clear limits this seems like a blanket justification to mod any post for any reason so long as the poster recalls the same themes, which literally everybody here (and everywhere) always does to a degree.

Le Comité better think about what they're doing on this one, because focusing on a handful of issues to a weird degree is almost the sum total of this website's content.

Is this how the single-issue posting rule is going to be applied? I see multiple comments on non-dating subjects in /u/SkookumTree‘s first two pages of comments.