domain:cafeamericainmag.com
Hadad
48m ago
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran?
Others have taken the meat of your post to respond to already, so I'm going to reply with a tangent: who cares?
What utility does knowing Iran's population matter? What relevance is the specific number of Iranians to any American interests? They're a far group whose only relevance is how much they might endanger our investments in the Middle East with their constant terrorism funding and sabber-rattling. There could be ten million, twenty, one hundred, it'd change no calculus.
The population of a minor nation across the sea is trivia. It's not important knowledge, and not knowing it shouldn't be taken as significant. It's like not knowing what Burkina Faso is the capital of.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
50m ago
Yeah fair enough, it's not the greatest argument
I was mostly playing devil's advocate because I found his line of thinking interesting and kind of a funny way to run an idea out to the extreme end
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
51m ago
It turns out that it doesn't take a lot of education or healthcare access to drive to Walmart and spend 20 bucks on Plan B.
Yes exactly
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
52m ago
Dude, I know you are a Dread Jim fan, and I think he's actually serious about what he says, but do you realize the world he proposes would be a dystopian nightmare, and not just for women? The guys who seem most attracted to Jim are not trad religious types or pro-civilization vitalists, but incels who long for a world where 13-year-old slave girls will have to pleasure them while they're on their couches playing video games. That's not what would actually happen, and the thing Jim misses is that women are always going to have some agency because we are human beings and the natural state of men and women is to, you know, like each other.
Jim is the flip side of the literal man-hating radical feminists promoting political lesbianism- they start with some (perhaps justified) grievances against the opposite sex, and go down a rabbit hole into a worldview full of misery and the destruction of everything it means to be human.
Every time I see that "Make Women Property Again" essay, I get the same vibe I do from KulakRevolt and his absurd, ahistorical rants making up some mindset about the ancients that they definitely did not have. Even in the most misogynistic cultures in the world, most men don't actually hate women as much as Jim does. To the degree that women were "property," you still saw some actual affection and respect for wives, mothers, and daughters, an affection that Jim and his fanboys seem to think is pussy and gay.
It's not good for you, man.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
55m ago
Yeah my wording sucked, I was being snarky and pointing out the answer to this question is "it isn't and it failed"
My main point is that it's doubly difficult to analyze how effective various methods could be, given a society that has been pushing for ubiquitous premarital sex for decades.
That's very fair. I'm sure abstinence only sex ed (or other social pressure) would work way better without the sexual liberation movement, etc
I guess I'd also say that kind of supports where I'm going with all this? The cat is out of the bag, society has shifted HARD into embracing pre-maritial non-procreative sex. So any proposal that goes along the lines of "simply undo all that" is pretty unlikely to work.
Maybe we'll have a conservative shift back if Gen Z/Alpha burn out hard on Tinder, idk. But western society has been on a pretty steady clip of "don't tell me what to do" for the past few hundred years, so again, feels unlikely.
Trying to stop single mom's from existing by telling people who aren't moms yet not to fuck is going to result in the exact same number of single moms for at least the next 5-20 years even if the societal shift were vibing about were to happen.
Hadad
56m ago
As politely as I can, "this place is a den of right-wing iniquity" has been a standard cry of more left-leaning posters here since we were still on Reddit, and it's never, not even once, been born out by surveys, group composition, self-professed identities, etc., etc.
People who aren't familiar with the right simply have such a low threshold for right-wing sentiment that any being allowed codes as a flood.
rae
1hr ago
I was talking about my own Lived Experienced™ though! Maybe I should have cleared that up more. Oh well.
I think blackpill/manosphere/battle-of-the-sex discussions benefit from queer viewpoints as they can bridge the gaps between the sides so to speak, so I’m happy to give my two cents regardless.
Tenaz
1hr ago
I dropped out of college to get a software development job in crypto. I don't have a bachelor's.
I'd love to find a good engineer mentor--everywhere I've worked, I've been the only one doing anything similar to what I do. But so far I haven't been able to pass interviews at the larger crypto companies, which are getting quite competitive, and don't have any lateral connections to take advantage of. So I'm stuck in that regard unless I can figure out something that really makes me stand out.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Alexander and I have broken a lance on each other over this before. He's advocating for abortion not so much as pure eugenics but in a class sense: we don't need or want the underclass to reproduce, and to elevate decent working-class people to the middle class they need to embrace the habits of the middle class, which includes no babies for teenagers, no babies outside marriage, and only a limited number of kids within marriage, preferably but not always after education and establishing a career. He has no objection to "get married at twenty, have kids" as long as it comes with "have a decent job, maybe even both of you, and only have two kids spaced appropriately apart and not immediately after you get married".
He can't or won't understand that for someone who genuinely believes abortion is wrong, that while getting pregnant outside of marriage is bad, it is worse to kill the baby. Better a single mother than a sexually active woman who avoids motherhood by infanticide. To be fair to him, he does think the right should dump the religious conservatives who think abortion is murder and instead start selling the message that you need to be productive, get a job, get married, and have the right number of kids that you bring up with the right values so you aspire to the middle class life and drag yourself up by your bootstraps, and that means shaming girls and women who get pregnant and don't get an abortion.
Tenaz
1hr ago
Yeah this is what I was worried about. I don't really like programming--maybe partially because I'm not great at it yet. I enjoy LeetCode but in practice putting things together is just drudgery. It makes me wonder if I should instead go into something which other people find less interesting, but I find equally or more interesting, like law.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1hr ago
HereAndGone
1hr ago
"That sweet enemy France" 😀
Google AI will say that there is no specific author of that phrase, it mentions a book by that title, but I know better, having first encountered it mentioned by Chesterton:
"Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line; "Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France."
And looking up Sir Philip Sidney, it comes from a poem:
Astrophil and Stella 41 By Sir Philip Sidney
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtain'd the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town folks my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man of arms did make.
How far they shot awry! The true cause is,
Stella look'd on, and from her heav'nly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.
So sorry, Google Gemini, but you're wrong; the book gets its title from "a direct quote from a specific individual":
The phrase "sweet enemy" is not a direct quote from a specific individual but rather a thematic encapsulation of the book's central argument.
rae
1hr ago
I have to ask what you're basing your statements off of because none of these statements are true for the "average" man, and they haven't been for at least the last 10 years. Full disclosure, I'm a late millennial/early zoomer (late 90s to early aughts) straight male.
This is my own lived experience as a bisexual man (at that time), and this was in the last 10 years as well. I’m not American though, so perhaps it’s different and more cut-throat in the US?
I was no “chad”, just a short skinny effeminate guy. I had an awful personality, little interest in women and still a few hook-ups and flings just happened from going with the flow. Getting set-up at work was a real thing that happened to me.
AugustDeRosa
1hr ago
While I don't believe Cruz is stupid (based on his background, he is probably one of the most intelligent members of the current batch of leadership amongst the American right, although to be frank I think there are some genuinely not very smart people amongst them so perhaps I'm being too charitable due to who I'm comparing him with), the one thing that I genuinely thought was pretty 'stupid' in this interview was his inability to engage with the issue of whether the polity of Israel in 2025 is the same Israel referred to in the Bible. His arguments elsewhere were not particularly 'stupid', they were just occasionally dishonest or misleading, but in this one instance he seemed to be genuinely confused as to how two things that have the same name and are somewhat similar in 'type' couldn't be the same thing.
Clementine
1hr ago
You can either shoot the dad and now have two single moms, doubling the problem, or you think that when a man cheats on his wife either his wife or the woman he cheated with and impregnated (who he may have lied to and might not have known he was married) should be shot. Which one was the intended meaning of your comment?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
Isn't the reason that if you wait until puberty is nearly complete, it becomes much harder to pass in the future?
HereAndGone
1hr ago
The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision.
Except (Protestant) Germany had the problem that since Luther, monasticism and religious life was strongly downgraded in favour of "God wants you all to get married, have kids - 'be fruitful and multiply'" (Luther did a lot of writing about how there was in fact no right to take a vow of celibacy and nobody could impose it on you or punish you for breaking it).
So if you have a lot of single women and no husbands for them, you have a problem as to what you do with them. If they get pregnant outside of marriage, then if you need the rebuilding of the population, you can't afford to shame them. Discreet (or not so discreet) abortions of future citizens in a country that lost a lot of men during the previous war is going to leave you weak, particularly if the people in charge have a shiny new ideal of being the Master Race and conquering all of Europe by right.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
I only read about 50 chapters
As ludicrous as it sounds, this is nowhere enough to judge the quality of most Xianxia, including the good ones.
I didn't mind the start, but I can promise you the novel gets better. I'm calling it a contender for my favorite novel despite the flaws and teething pains.
Seeing romance as a weakness seems like the surface-assessment of a 14-year-old. You should rather let yourself fall in love with somebody far out of your league - this would help you improve faster. Motivation comes from emotions, so killing all your emotions doesn't make you a perfect rational agent, it merely drains your life of meaning and reasons to go on. I'm quite confident that crazy people generally outperform rational people unless the latter is highly conscientious - "you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star". The "Dao" that these cultivators build is literally a worldview/a personal path. Manga like "The world after the fall" show this concept well. People who are too rational cannot do this, they barely have their own opinions and values, they believe that things are either universally true or universally false, they do not have faith in subjective and personal things.
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
More seriously, Fang Yuan is a maximally motivated character. There is nothing that a romance could do to make him aspire to be better, any faster.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1hr ago
US/Israel/Iran/Russia.
It seems quite conspicuous how on one hand US engagement with the Israel/Iran war, widely seen as something that is very personal for Trump for whatever reason, coincides with a much-lamented acceleration of the softening of his stance on Russia; and on the other hand Russia is also conspicuously sitting on the fence regarding the conflict, despite their previous military collaboration with Iran and it being ostensibly natural for them to take this opportunity to set another trap for the Western coalition.
Do you figure it could be the case that Trump decided to buy Putin's neutrality on the matter by offering him at least a period of US stonewalling on further pro-Ukraine action? The null hypothesis I can think of is that Putin just independently appreciates that Israel has been reticent to support Ukraine directly so far, while Trump's rapprochement with Russia is just a natural continuation of his preexisting trajectory and not particularly connected to Iran.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
This is sophistry. The distinction in sex between a 13-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy developing facial hair is not a legal one, it's a biological one -- one is abnormal and the other is normal. That the law recognizes there's a distinction does not mean it's making legal distinctions based on sex.
Tenaz
1hr ago
It doesn't prevent a baby from growing up though, it prevents a baby from being created in the first place.
"Natural course" is shorthand for a very complex concept I'll admit I can't rigorously define. But I do think it's intuitive that sex and embryos don't lead to babies in the same way. It's not just a question of progress, embryos being further along.
The problem with protecting the potential of personhood is that it starts even before conception.
This is what I take issue with. "Potential" of personhood, as commonly used, does not start before conception.
SSCReader
1hr ago
There is approximately a zero percent chance that America as a going concern could survive a significant portion of its population concluding that they were being ruled by actual tyrants. Things would go so bad so fast it would make your head spin.
It did once (twice?) before right? Sure a Civil War would be bad, but countries come out the other side all the time. If one side wins conclusively I see no reason why America wouldn't carry on. Both the US and the UK have had actual real civil wars and both survived (and thrived in fact!) as going concerns. The US is even to an extent the product of a Civil war (you call it Revolutionary, but you're still just fighting against people from the same nation at the time). I can see circumstances where that wouldn't happen of course, but it seems like setting the bar at zero percent is just ignoring history needlessly.
You can in fact kill large numbers of your civil war enemies, burn down their homes, conquer them and force them back into obedience for hundreds of years. You can in fact lose a Civil War, relinquish your former ruled areas and still be a going concern and then later become firm allies with the very nation formed from that Civil war with both of you still being going concerns.
The chance of any of that certainly isn't 100% but I don't think it's 0% either.
Some somewhat unstructured thoughts:
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
While "Cruz doesn't know anything about Iran" seems to have been the big takeaway that people focus on from this interview, I think the much more important and more alarming part is, as you pointed out, the religious element - but I don't think it's a case of stupidity, at least on that specific issue, or of ignorance. "What is with him" is that he genuinely believes that his God, through scripture, has commanded him to support Israel, and there are many in the upper echelons of the US government who genuinely and wholeheartedly believe the same thing.
"Republicans want to go to war in the Middle East because they're Millennialist Christians" is one of those horseshoe / bell-curve-meme situations where if you know nothing about the state of the American right, you probably believe it, if you are sort of read up on the American right, you probably think it's nonsense, and if you really listen to everything they say and the actions they take and try and discern their motivations, then yeah, it turns out they really just do believe it. Yes, sometimes they'll give other justifications based on liberal principles or American statecraft or plain might makes right rhetoric, and sometimes those justifications make sense, but they are all made in the shadow of the initial basis of theology. They are add-ons, NOT the central thing itself. In that way, it's telling that Cruz gives two reasons for his unconditional support of Israel, and the first one he describes is theological.
I really wish Tucker had asked the natural follow up, which is, "If your God has commanded you to support Israel, then surely you would do it even if it was actively against American interests?", but he instead chooses to focus on the difference between what Israel meant in the Bible and whether it can be understood to refer to the modern-day polity of Israel (the answer is very obviously no, because the polity did not exist in any meaningful form, but Cruz refuses to engage properly on that point).
HOWEVER, with all that said, I would be curious as to whether Tucker himself disagrees with the idea that Christians have some obligation to support some form of Israel, whether that is just "the chosen people" (i.e. Jews). I've heard some Christians explain this away by saying that "nah, doesn't matter because Jesus, new covenant, we're all God's chosen, etc. etc." but I don't think that holds out when you read through the Bible. I, personally, follow in the strong and storied European tradition of pick-whatever-works faith, so would be interested in what the more theologically-minded Christians of the motte believe.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
does abstinence only sex education show any efficacy in preventing pregnancies?
IIRC other methods don't really work that well either.
South Korea's culture is quite good at preventing pregnancies, but creates a much bigger set of problems.
Chesterton had some bangers, I also thought of a slightly sneer-y remix I'd like to get your thoughts on.
"The Marxist ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
If you disagree with this, I'd love to know why?
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