domain:mattlakeman.org
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
Wait is Chili's not considered a full-service restaurant?
Chili's was the first restaurant I encountered that replaced ordering with a tablet at the table, and that was back in... 2012ish? There was still waitstaff to deliver the food and drinks, but they didn't do the ordering process and there was less attention overall.
It's closer to full service than Chipotle or Five Guys, but I wouldn't call it full-service in the old way either. Chili's is also directly competing with McDonald's now so that's interesting.
I've been mooching around Sydney as of late trying to find some lesser-known historic heritage sites in the city that are nonetheless impressive. So, nothing obvious like the Queen Victoria Building, St. Mary's Cathedral and so on. Two of the historic buildings I visited recently surprised me.
1: Yiu Ming Temple. This is a traditional village temple in Alexandria built by settlers from Guangdong circa 1908. It's rather surprising to me that this even exists in Sydney; what makes it even more surreal is that the temple's hidden behind a large brick wall and a row of shops. So it's isolated in a small cranny blocked off from the rest of the city, and stepping past the gate into that weird little back street feels like entering a little pocket of Asia. It even smells exactly like Asia (probably due to all the incense being burned). Highly trippy visit, actually. I've heard there's an even older one that dates back to the 19th century in Glebe, I may pay that temple a visit sometime.
2: The Cathedral of the Annunciation of Our Lady. I visited this one today. It was initially built from 1848-1855 in Redfern as an Anglican place of worship, but was later sold to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and reconsecrated as a Greek Orthodox church. It's really unassuming on the outside and seems like your typical brick church, but the interior is jaw-dropping. Rows of chandeliers hang from the ceiling, the altar is adorned with an insane amount of golden finery and the ceiling is covered in frescoes. It doesn't seem to be well known - it was completely empty when I visited, yet it's probably one of my favourite historic sites I've visited in Sydney and in my estimation it's even comparable to many churches in Europe in its architectural beauty.
Here are photos of each of the sites (I know the resolution isn't always fantastic, my phone is a potato, deal with it).
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
No, but you don't hear about the ones that just manage the neighborhood to the satisfaction of the residents.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
They're a replacement of the city layer of government in parts of the US where people live at suburban density outside cities.
True rural life has rules that assume each owner had many acres and most activities don't meaningfully affect their neighbors enjoyment of their landm. This sucks when houses get built at suburban densities (less than half an acre per home) so HOAs let communities build shared infastructure (roads and sewers mostly) and set community standards like cities do. They don't use laws which apply to new homeowners rather they use deed covenants.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Serious question; how are HOAs legal / constitutional?
The way I understand them, they are, generally, private non-profits. Yet, moving into an area "governed" by compels you to join them. There is no option not to.
How could such a thing be legal? The whole point of local-state-federal government is that they are the only "organization" one is compelled to be subject to. I can't square the existence of HOAs with the necessity of a government (even at the local level) maintaining full sovereign over its geographic jurisdiction
dr_analog
razorboy
1d ago
Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US.
I'm okay at Spanish and haven't found it very useful. Whereas I feel like I'm somewhat blind to one of the largest cultural and geopolitical transformations of our time by not being able to understand Chinese.
Joyful
1d ago
Speaking spanish is the only other language as an American that doesn't correspond with an increase in income, though (I believe this fact is from a freakonomics podcast ten years ago).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US. Wikipedia says that in the US it’s something like 42 million vs 3.5 million and the Spanish one feels like maybe even an underestimate. I’m not saying Chinese is useless - personally I’d view it as #2 most useful second language? But a 10-fold difference increase in speaking opportunities is pretty stark. Frankly everything after that falls off pretty quickly in usefulness, possibly with the exception of French, where the point of learning is more for its own sake rather than an actual expected ROI of any kind. (They say that a second language eventually can help mental development, after a brief confusion period depending on the age, so language of any kind might still be a mild net benefit even without a lasting return, but the significance of this is debated.)
You may have a point about the Chinese school. It’s not all sunshine and roses though, as noted below, but I’d say directionally it sounds like an idea worth exploring for sure.
oats_son
1d ago
Languages are ultimately useless, until they aren't. I think any of the three would be a good choice. Japanese would probably have a lot of the same benefits as Chinese, and it would open your kid up to working in neat liberal democratic Japan instead of crazy and bad and oppressive China (or Taiwan, I guess). There are a lot more admittedly insular Chinese speakers in America that could be spoken to, but Japan puts out a lot more cultural output, providing something you might actually want to use the language for.
I guess part of the consideration here would be that Spanish is relatively easy for an English speaker to learn, and Japanese and Chinese are not.
I recently watched the so-bad-it's-good movie classic, Hard Ticket To Hawaii. It came out in 1987 and the two leads were Playboy bunnies (or at least appeared in Playboy) who are frequently nude in the film. And speaking as a modern man, it's amazing how terrible their fake boobs are. I think I actually have a high tolerance for cosmetic fakeness - I usually like fake boobs when I see them - but holy shit those boobs are awful. These girls were considered to be among the hottest women in America at the time, and their boobs were far worse than any random no-name pornstar's today. It really made me appreciate that cosmetic surgery has evolved by leaps and bounds over the last 30 years.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
To be clear, at least in the context of the arguments today as I understand them, the major question of relief was not actually for individuals but for states who would bear a very large administrative burden if birthright citizenship were struck down (3.5 million babies a year born, would they all need to provide residency papers? That’s a lot of paperwork and paperwork costs money). So at least in the current form of the debate, unborn kids are not directly relevant (though this indication is something the SC might address, so it’s still a valid question)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Yeah it’s a good question. Other outlets like the NYT actually mentioned that Kagan quote. On the other hand, the three he did list without Kagan seem to be the ones many court watchers think will be on the losing side of a 6-3 decision, so maybe that was what he was trying to imply?
I don’t think there are full remarks available online - actually it was also Politico who were the original source on Kagan here and I will say the context does matter. The larger thrust of her answer (as framed in the original source, which is just snippets with paraphrasing or summarization) was about over-politicization of the law more broadly. I note that when Harvard Law Review last year in tackling the nationwide injunction issue, cited the exact same quote, it was as evidence that she wanted to limit judge shopping, not as directly against injunctions, though clearly the two are still intertwined. So I think there’s at least some space for Frost here.
I think an interesting point is also just how the nationwide injunction issue doesn’t quite cut neatly across partisan lines, both parties have been frustrated by it and I don’t get the sense there is broad alignment here, regardless of whatever Trump’s lawyers are arguing. They’ve twisted themselves in pretzels before.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Sure seems too. I had a buddy who lived in a shitty townhome community in a bad part of town, and the HOA rode his ass about the color of his front door (which was picked directly from the HOA's list of approved colors), but didn't seem to care one wit about the broken down vehicles scattered about the guest parking spaces, the litter scattered about by scumbag kids, or any of the other daily inconveniences caused by living among low trust, high time preference demographics.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
I beat the Mechwarrior 5 Clans Ghost Bear DLC. It was short and sweat, with only 12 missions. I can't definitively say it was worth the $20 for everyone, but I'm happy with my purchase. I enjoyed the story, and the whole culture, of Clan Ghost Bear a lot more than the "We're gonna commit awesome war crimes but then try to make you feel bad about it" approach the Smoke Jaguar campaign took. Smoke Jaguar is synonymous with remorseless war crimes god damnit! If you have to lampshade what's coming to them, don't have a bunch of novice warriors questioning how genocide makes them feel bad. Have them mocking the doubters with "What is the inner sphere gonna do? A trial of annihilation?" And then have them belly laugh like you just suggested they start freebirthing too.
Anyways, that's the base game. The DLC was awesome, nothing annoyed me beyond the ubiquity of having all the authority figures be boss bitches. Because current year I guess. Like I know female khans, sakhans, star commanders etc were common in the clans. But their representation in MW5:Clans and it's expansion is like 70-80% of authority figures, and 90% of the "good" ones. Ah well.
What ancient Internet history can tell us about the rise of the Woke Right
A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of the Woke Right! We've discussed it before ourselves, opinion range from "it's an op" to "there might be something to it", but one way or the other, a decent chunk of the anti-woke coalition it's an issue that needs to be addressed.
Recently Douglas Murray went on Joe Rogan and had a conversation with Dave Smith about, among other things, the responsibility of influencers with huge platforms to the public. Smith and Rogan took the familiar position of "muh marketplace of ideas", while Murray believes that people with so much influence should be a bit more selective, because exposing the public to bad ideas will lead to some part of the audience uncritically adopting them.
The conversation made huge waves and sparked a massive discussion, articles by Konstantin Kisin, tweet storms by James Lindsay, follow up conversation between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, between Peterson and Lindsay, and more recently between Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. In short, though not all of them might put it in the same terms, some on the anti-woke side fear that following Trump's victory the right "got it's mojo back" and now some of it's more extreme ideas are entering the mainstream discourse, so the centrist liberals want to prevent the "pendulum swinging back"...
...and all I can think is "I've seen it all before"...
First as a farce...
Let me take you back to the year of our lord 2017. It wasn't that long ago, and yet the vibe of the time was so different it almost feels like it was all a dream. Back then the way to make money on big SocMeds was to clown on Social Justice, so everybody and their dog had to have a cartoon character Youtube channel deboonking Buzzfeed. The situation was so dire for SJs that any video trying to put their position forward would yield and endless stream of critical responses which, to add insult to injury, would end up filling the recommended feed of the original pro-SJ video. Trump has also just entered office for the first time, so in that atmosphere it felt like anti-woke liberalism is unstoppable. And then a few things happened:
- The Killroy Conference
With so much online hype in the air, a person going by the name "BasedMama" decided to take the anti-SJW phenomenon to the next level, and host an IRL event. I still unironically think this was a great idea, even now the Dissident Right regularly talks about the importance of real-world organising, and with a guest list consisting of massive influencers from Tim Pool to Sargon of Akkad, the event had the potential to be a huge success. I can't point to anything specific now, but I distinctly remember the SJWs genuinely unnerved by the prospect of it taking place...
...but luckily for them it crashed and burned at an astonishing pace. First, the invited guests started complaining about demands to sign NDA's and non-compete contracts. The smaller ones went along with it, but the bigger ones, many no strangers to the conference circuit, said they're having none of it. Tim Pool publically dropped out with a video to his fans, explaining why he's not going to be at the event. The organizers' attempts at damage control only exasperated the backlash, causing even more guests to drop out. It even turned out that the guest list announced during the crowdfunding campaign was a "fake it 'till you make it" thing and some of the big names never actually signed on.
More relevant to what I want to discuss here: the whole event was marketed as a "free speech" conference, so naturally it attracted the attention of "witches": HBDers, Alt-Righters, and others with ideas rejected by polite society, and as it turned out, by the organizers themselves, who were on record expressing sympathy for the ideas of Social Justice, just thought that their current iteration went too far. That's all perfectly valid as far as I'm concerned, no one is entitled to a slot at a conference, but the usual way to handle this sort of issue is to say "you're welcome to come, but golly gee, we ran out of time/space to host any more speakers/panels", but BasedMama et. al. decided to handle it in the worst possible way: announce the witches will have their panels to get the crowdfunding / ticket money of their audiences, and only then say "oopsie, we ran out of slots". What's worse, people quickly joined the dots and realized that it's only people with a specific kind of views that there seems to be no time for. The "free speech" event was quickly seen for a sham, and all except for the most diehard supporters dropped out. An event that could have plausibly attracted thousands ended up get 20-40 attendants, from what I recall.
- KrautAndTea's crusade against the Alt-Right
Back in the online world the youtuber KrautAndTea decided it's time to balance out his usual dunking on feminists and Muslim-immigration-enjoyers with dunking on the more extreme elements on the right. He started accusing various B-List youtubers of being cryptonazis, of trying to lure people in with relatively inoffensive critiques of society, and then radicalizing them into the Alt-Right. Also, with videos like "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics (and Maths)" and "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics and Physiology", he decided to take on the Big Kahuna - HBD, or what was then going by as Race Realism.
What he did not take into account, however, was the possibility that the academic establishment sold him a bill of goods, and the actual science is much more on the HBDers' side than he expected... Various Alt-Right youtubers like Alt-Hype and JF Gariepy proceeded to take turns taking the piss out of him, and pointing out each and every way he was wrong. The familiar dynamic of critical responses appearing, and becoming more popular than the original "deboonking" video was now unleashed on Kraut. It did not go well for him. He ended up crashing out, got caught red-handed coordinating to flag Alt-Right videos, and coming up with some convoluted Discord schemes to humiliate his opponents. Long story short, he ended up having to take a hiatus from the internet, and to rebrand upon comeback.
- The Candid Saga
Back before anyone really heard of influencer marketing, an amazing new app took the internet by storm - Candid, an online forum promising to host uncensored anonymous conversations. All your favorite youtubers were shilling it. It was the Raid, Shadow Legends of online forums... until it was all taken down by a single autistic NEET...
A youtuber going by HarmfulOpinions decided to take a deeper look at the app, and quickly found out that rather than being uncensored, Candid's moderation was powered by a woke AI. What is now accepted as a fact of life was enough to spark a massive controversy back then, not only against the company, but against the influencers that failed to do their due diligence before shilling a product. The CEO's attempts at damage control were hilariously inept, and only resulted in the hole being dug deeper, but more to the point, starved for cash in the wake of the Adpocalypse, the anti-SJW influencers decided to circle the wagons around Candid. Some realized they backed the wrong horse, and exited gracefully, but others tried using their superior numbers (both in terms of videos and their reach) to discredit HarmfulOpinions and paint him as a conspiracy theorist.
This too did not go well. Candid collapsed as a company, and the influencers involved in shilling it to the bitter end took a massive hit to their credibility.
If you want a glimpse into the past as I saw it, you can watch Mister Metokur's Tales of Trout, and the archive of Harmful Opinions' Candid series. I don't know if I actually recommend them unless you really have nothing better to do. I used to find them hilarious, but they just don't land the same way anymore. I will say they are interesting as a time capsule, and Harmful's videos in particular feels like a sign of things to come - scammy Indian CEO's, AI training to surveil and censor dissidents, conspiracy theories that are, in hindsight, naive to not believe in - that series has it all!
There was more to the story than these 3 events, of course, but those are the broad strokes of what I remember. The end result was pretty much a total collapse of the Youtube anti-SJW sphere, and gave rise to another trend called "Internet Bloodsports", aiming to center authenticity and direct confrontations over fake politeness and highschool Mean Girls games, but ended in whoring yourself out for superchats and brandishing firearms on the streets of Florida, while singing what might as well have been Kanye's latest hit.
More importantly, it was followed by the rise of BreadTube and nearly a decade of darkness, as far as internet discourse is concerned.
...then as a tragedy?
Now, it may seem like I'm putting all the blame on the left-liberal faction of the anti-woke / anti-SJW sphere, and as much as I have issues with them, I want to give them their due. Kraut was right about cryptonazis luring people in with more inoffensive stuff. We regularly see it happen right here on the Motte, with that dude that keeps nuking his accounts, so Douglas' Murray's "be careful what you're watering" argument is not wrong.
I’ve also seen enough crowds being manipulated that I can even understand his sudden turn towards trusting the experts, especially if you keep the previous argument in mind. The antidote to bad speech might be more speech, and sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but if there are crypto-authoritarians on the loose, who have no qualms about presenting themselves dishonestly, they might be able to win the crowd over long enough to take political control, and shut off all opposition. This is essentially what the woke left did, and it’s what some are afraid the woke right might pull off as well.
The problem is that the entire legitimacy of liberalism rests on the free exchange of ideas. This is especially true for the anti-woke ones, as they spent the last 8 years fending off accusation of Nazism themselves, and begging for a seat at the table. If they want to shut off the secretive and the dishonest that’s fair enough (though I will have question about Murray's quiet mumbling when his support for a new war in Iran was brought up), but they have an obligation to directly confront the open and the honest, even if they find their views disgusting.
I don’t mind being called “woke right”, if you can actually address my ideas head-on. I’ve said it before - it’s perfectly natural for liberals to attack me with all their vigor, because I oppose their fundamental values. It would be sad and disappointing if this didn’t illicit the kind of visceral reaction they are showing. However, I do mind being called “woke right” if it’s just a way to shut me out of a conversation, by slapping a scary label on me.
Actually, forget about me minding anything, the argument I’m trying to make here is that it will be a disaster for the liberals, if they keep trying to win by gatekeeping. It will be like training an AI on it's own output. A reasonable concern about about the pendulum swinging too far back, will end in declaring that wanting the economy to serve the people is fascist, finding racism in ham sandwitches, and deranged theories about angel summoners. And if you position yourself as an expert and spend all this time complaining about all these clowns hiding behind comedy when confronted on their takes about serious issues, maybe come up with a better argument then "people love talking about Paul Wolfowitz because his name starts with a nasty animal, and he's Jewish".
I reversed Marx' famous quip, because it's all fun and games when the story involves cartoon avatars, and characters with names like BasedMama and KrautAndTea, but when I see Conservative Inc. playing the same "you are wrong, and dumb for believing this" game that Kraut did, the same "we're for free speech, but you shouldn't be given such a big platform" game that Killroy did, and the same whisper networks that would try to psy-op you into believing someone's an insane conspiracy theorist now coordinating to make "Woke Right" a thing, I don't really feel like laughing. I've seen how the story involving a bunch of online autists ends, so when I see these dynamics play out on the scale of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, I get a bit nervous.
FtttG
1d ago
Only a small minority of women have the sort of ideal breasts that earn you a Playboy photoshoot, so small that it’s impossible to fill all titty mags only with pictures of them.
Interesting question - has there ever been a lad's mag which specifically marketed itself with the USP of only featuring breasts without implants?
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
I think honestly you should have the ability to do a National injunction but it should be a situation where you have to get all the plaintiffs on one case, and it should be automatically taken up by SCOTUS.
Maybe, but only if the nation injunction takes effect if the SCOTUS agrees to take it up, and is negated if SCOTUS refuses the case. Otherwise, this could easily cause more harm than it avoids.
One of the critical institutional power factors of the Supreme Court is precisely that it gets to choose it's own cases. This is power over other branches of government, but also a power over the rest of the judiciary. The Supreme Court gets to dodge politically untenable legal issues that could threaten the independence of the court precisely because it reserves the right to ignore a court for now but overrule it later. The ability to disagree later-but-not-now is a positional influence which can allow the Supreme Court members to pick their battle and avoid unfavorable contexts.
Forcing the Supreme Court to take cases is a way of exercising process control/influence to influence the Supreme Court. A coalition that is already willing to abuse injunctions through willing partners in the mid-judiciary could easily use the lack of case autonomy to force the Supreme Court into politically untenable positions that provide the political cover to either force SC endorsement, or use the refusal as the political basis to dismantle institutional independence until the political pressure can dominate. Either way undercuts the Supreme Court's institutional autonomy and pressures it into political conformity with lower courts.
Which might be fine and preferable if you think the lower courts are on your side / substantially correct. But the issue of nationwide injunctions itself- where an overwhelming majority of injunctions in the last quarter century have been against one party, despite the Presidency having been evenly split between two parties- indicate a lack of consensus that would legitimize such a position.
dr_analog
razorboy
1d ago
Does every HOA start imploding on harassing people over trivialities after they achieve their primary mission of keeping human garbage out of the neighborhood?
dr_analog
razorboy
1d ago
It's rather amazing how successful Hef was at this. Even women that don't like their husbands' porn consumption find Playboy's brand tolerable, maybe even civilizing.
A GF bought me a subscription to Playboy for my birthday actually, back when it was a thing.
Tree
1d ago
Let me put it this way : one black muslim, five black christians, or a hundred poles. I'm not sure more than a trickle of black christians would make the cut at my ideal immigration level. Some igbos, yeah.
Part of the reason our immigration policy is such a disaster is an obstinate refusal by the elites to see things in anything approaching a utilitarian, cost-benefit way. Or rather, they decided that the 'humanitarian' part of immigration should not be sullied by contact with the 'useful' part (which demanded degrees, language skills, civic understanding of our society, etc). They're low decouplers, I suppose. The results are that our humanitarian immigrants are the least useful (= most damaging) immigrants in the world.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The "battered housewife" is explained spectacularly; a seller who has priced themselves too low or has an overactive instinct to sell in this area. This is also why, as the price of women increased due to their economic situation improving through technology, wife-beating and spousal abuse has declined: husbands simply cannot afford women that will permit them to do that
This has got to be the craziest explanation for domestic violence I've ever read, and I'm following a current murder trial where the guy who killed his wife is plainly lying through his teeth about everything that led up to the murder, as well as the murder itself, and the aftermath of the murder, including allegations that he was a victim of long-running domestic violence (but never told anybody because well he didn't like them to think badly of his wife).
HereAndGone
1d ago
The way I've seen it presented is "hah hah I am using my sexuality to manipulate men, these suckers pay me lots of money and I don't have to do anything except jiggle my tits in front of their faces" (though if they're prostitutes, they do have to perform the acts requested). They present this as "I'm in control, I know what's going on, nobody is using me" (except, as I said, the majority of owners of brothels and strip clubs and so on are men, and they are the ones getting the profits). And this selling of sex only is possible so long as they're deemed attractive and youthful enough to get high prices; as they get older, their options also dwindle unless they're smart enough to get out early and find a line of work to go into.
Look at Stormy Daniels. What is her career now? Mostly trying to squeeze the final drops of blood out of the turnip of "I had an affair with Trump" by peddling her story to whoever will pay to broadcast it. Without that link, she's just another former porn actress who aged out of the industry. Whatever money she first got paid off with, clearly she blew through it and needed to get more by the traditional "mistress/whore of famous man tells all" method. Then she got cheated by Michael Avenatti, so you can't really take her career as one of "powerful strong independent woman uses and discards men", it's really the other way round.
HereAndGone
1d ago
There's a difference between people with low libido, who find this distressing and alienating to partners, and who want to have more sex and be more interested in sex, and so they seek treatment, and people who are asexual, happy about that, and don't want to change.
The self-diagnosed online types who have a laundry list of illnesses from the physical to mental, to prove what sensitive little flowers they are and how you cannot be mean to them at all, are the ones who may latch on to asexuality/demisexuality as another way to burnish their resumés, as it were: now I'm queer as well (if I can't manage to be trans or gay or lesbian or bi) so if you say anything at all that I disagree with, I can now accuse you of homophobia as well as the rest of the list of your crimes against the differently abled.
I think this is leaving out another viable life path that satisfies all the criteria you're ascribing to women:
Have a kid with a man who has proven wealth/means, then demonstrate his paternity or marry him. Then have a court of law require him to pay for the child's upbringing until age 18. If married then you can get some alimony too out of the divorce. And a bonus there is you can then find another man who might be willing to pitch in some support too and 'double dip'. For some reason the term 'divorce' doesn't appear anywhere in your original post.
And from the man's perspective, either of those is probably a worst case scenario.
Either the man is a cad who doesn't WANT to support kids and is now tied to them for years on end.
Or it was a man who really wanted to have a family for the long term, would have supported them anyway, and yet gets them ripped away on the say of the woman he trusted, with no real recourse.
Woman gets her support and control, man gets...
And we're seeing the emergence of a strange additional option as well:
Pop out a billionaire's kid on the downlow and he pays a very generous amount to keep you and the child in comfort even if he's not particularly involved, as long as he thinks it is actually his kid. I won't pretend this path is all that common, though.
This really goes AGAINST your point here, though:
The 'reproduction thing' seems to come easiest to men who are the least trustworthy, most ruthless, most wealthy, and generally most 'aggressive' about what they want. Yes, some of them can ACT like they're trustworthy, but only as a means to get what they want. And this works about as well as being 'actually' trustworthy.
Being 'trustworthy' just makes you an easier mark. You'll accept a woman you believe is committed to you, do EVERYTHING you can to prove your commitment, and she can still leave on a comparative whim and hang support obligations around your neck on the way out.
The game theory here is not favorable to being the guy who truly commits, when the risk is the woman has no reciprocal investment and can defect at will, and 'retaliating' against her is legally forbidden.
In short, I think you're arguing as though women shoulder most of the risks in the current romantic equation.
When there's a serious argument that it works the opposite way. Society is built around protecting women from any and all threats.
This includes the threat of homelessness and poverty. Men, generally, foot the bill for all this protection, and yet are also forced to pay out to the particular woman who defects from them on top of that.
And so the man is risking HUGE sums of his personal wealth (bought by his own time, efforts, sweat, etc.) to TRY to keep the woman around.
And men have to offer some extreme value ON TOP of that protection (because the protection is provided as a baseline by society) to acquire a woman's commitment, and even then he has no recourse if she decides she doesn't want to stay anymore. And if he married her, she gets to siphon off resources from him to support herself and her kids ANYWAY.
Leaving out this side of the equation makes your overall argument here more dubious, in my opinion.
(and I will surely admit that women DO risk being severely injured or killed by their partner, but this is strongly mediated by factors that she can also control).
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