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MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
2hr ago
For example, him talking about other nations spying on the US was completely correct and very honest; everyone spies on everyone, including allies, especially allies. It’s just a truth of the world, there’s nothing good or bad about it.
People getting their panties in a twist about it seems either performative or worse, incredibly naive.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Well, I'm taking "pro-single motherhood" to mean "don't have an abortion, have the baby" even if giving it up for adoption. The lesser of two evils. I wish Alexander would be clearer about what he intends to communicate, rather than just flinging some insults around.
Well, we got free love and contraception and abortion and divorce, and there are still plenty of prostitutes in London, and seemingly increasing amounts of young women selling sex for cash as a signal of empowerment or something. Schopenhauer plainly could not envision OnlyFans.
I do wonder where he got that figure, and who he was including in that. Did he mean "if only men could marry several women, there would be fewer women having to sell sex to survive"? Or did he mean "if living together without marriage was tolerated, many of these women would be in stable relationships"? Because uh, we got that, and we still have prostitution, escort work, sex work, porn, etc.
EDIT: Yeah, looking it up a little, those figures seem debatable. Schopenhauer could be including "poor women who sold sex from time to time, women living in irregular unions, women in temporary relationships" and the likes:
Although London police reports recorded there to be approximately 8,600 prostitutes known to them, it has been suggested that the true number of women prostituting during this time was closer to 80,000 (Rogers).
During the Victorian Age, prostitution did not subscribe to any one tradition; some women lived in brothels, some with soldiers or sailors, and some worked on the streets. Judith Walkowitz, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, highlights the different avenues available to prostitutes in her book Prostitution and Victorian Society. The most common form of prostitution during this time was streetwalking. Women who performed this act were most commonly those who supplemented their daily income with money they could earn by prostituting on occasion, but there were also some who used streetwalking as their primary source of income.
...During the Victorian Age, the number of prostitutes who actually lived in brothels was considerably low. Despite this, customers that behaved inappropriately towards the prostitutes that did inhabit such places were normally unappreciated and unwelcome (Walkowitz, 23-25)
I would tend to go with the police estimate for "prostitutes who are street walkers or in brothels" rather than "80,000 genuine no other income or relationship prostitutes". The link for the 80,000 figure seems to go "I got this from Rogers" "Hi I'm Rogers and I got this from Mayhew" and where did Mayhew get it?
To understand the mid-Victorian perception of prostitution we must appreciate the scale of the concern. Mayhew tells us that in 1857 there were 8,600 prostitutes in London known to the police but that the true number may have been nearer to 80,000 (Mayhew p. 476).
Mayhew, H. London Labour and the London Poor. Penguin, London 1985
Digging that one up gives me this source:
To show how difficult it is to give from any data at present before the public anything like a correct estimate of the number of prostitutes in London, we may mention (extracting from the work of Dr Ryan) that while the Bishop of Exeter asserted the number of prostitutes in London to be 80,000, the City Police stated to Dr Ryan that it did not exceed 7,000 to 8,000. About the year 1793 Mr Colquhoun, a police magistrate, concluded, after tedious investigations, that there were 50,000 prostitutes in this metropolis. At that period the population was one million, and as it is now more than double we may form some idea of the extensive ramifications of this insidious vide.
And here I stop, because I am not going to chase down Dr Ryan and the Bishop of Exeter.
But another writer cautions that Mayhew is not the most accurate for data:
Mayhew seems not to have corrected the errors in his text, even when he was willing to acknowledge them. (The long list of errata at the end of Vol. I is mostly taken up by inaccurate calculations.) E. P. Thompson’s conclusion seems reasonable: ‘Every single table and set of statistical data in Mayhew must be scrutinised, not for dishonesty or manipulation, but for sheer slipshod technique and haste in getting to press’, ‘The Political Education of Henry Mayhew’, Victorian Studies, 11 (September 1967); 41–62 (p.58).
Anyway, be it 8,000 or 80,000, contra Schopenhauer the problem was not monogamy but rather poverty: the lack of secure employment and good wages for working and lower class men, and the lack of employment for working and lower class women (street sellers of everything from flowers to vegetables to small items was the fall-back if no steady employment in domestic service or elsewhere). So it's the economy, stupid, not sexual politics that was driving women into part-time or full-time prostitution.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
I am not trying to speak for you, I said that was the impression I took away from previous encounters.
If you feel that this mischaracterises your position, then please state what your position is, including how you define "far-right" and why you think most people on here are far-right, because so far as I can see, your definition seems to be "not as enthusiastically pro-infanticide as me".
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
2hr ago
Too bad. Vanishingly few would truly rather be a single mother--rather they expect the benefits men normally bring to relationships be provided by society so they don't have to suffer the compromises necessary to make a relationship work. Such selfish entitlement shouldn't be encouraged by society.
remzem
2hr ago
The administration that caved and eventually brought back an ms-13 member all because there was a minor clerical error and, despite him being cleared for deportation, he wasn't cleared for deportation to El Salvador specifically so the media spent an entire month throwing a fit about it? I lack your faith. All the institutions are still aligned against Populists.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
Russia has no way of helping Iran. If this was in 3 years time and the war in Ukraine has ended with massive Russian victory and they couldn't turn off their military industrial complex for fear of the holy mother of depressions then I could see them sending shitload of material for cold hard cash. The only party that could help Iran now is China. But they still test their toys in Ukraine. And shipping now is hard. It is obvious that Iran has zero opsec. So they cannot arrange securely receiving anything even if someone was willing to send it to them.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2hr ago
Obviously, but I think the TRA would argue that this is exceptionally unusual and outweighed by the QoL improvements of early transition.
I strenuously disagree, but I do think that's the actual crux.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
Iran isn't just going to sit there and take being bombed. They may not have air defenses, but they have missiles, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're going to use those missiles to take out Saudi oil infrastructure. Or they might just block off the Straits of Hormuz, which we could clear, but it would require more than just bombing stationary targets. Or they could decide to protect their own oil assets, which are close to the border, by invading Iraq, starting another war that Iran might actually win, taking more oil offline. The bottom line is that you'd better be prepared for a sharp spike in gas prices, and one that won't subside until the war ends. If, as you say, you're going to go after every possible military installation in a country that covers over 600,000 square miles and has 90 million people, you'd better be prepared to pony up at the pump for a long time.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
Oh
My mistake for being unclear then.
I highly doubt America will be glassing Taiwan, that seems very unhelpful
Botond173
2hr ago
And if US didn't lose the war, Vietnam could be what South Korea is now. Which is better than what it is now.
How exactly?
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
2hr ago
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.
Nice humblebrag. Now I understand that was most likely not even meant as one, but that's how it comes across because that's how awful it is for most men nowadays. I'm not going to rehash Radicalizing the Romanceless, but it's even worse nowadays than when that article was written. Men are suffering.
And I think you're right in that it's worse in America, especially compared to East Asia, where I and my family were from originally, but with how widespread the American ideological contagion has become, I don't see thing getting better any time soon.
Are they just blindly lucky? Or do they persevere with some luck and effort - maybe a lot of luck - but mostly persistence?
I think that those are all people who are not socially and emotionally malformed via catastrophic deprivation of peer relations during childhood and teenage, and - thank you, COVID - early adult development, and all I hear from the rest of this response is that the only way to receive sympathy from people who share your approximate perspective is to take my society-mandated optimism and bang my head against a wall, no stopping allowed. I will admit that an example of Down's Syndrome was excessive: strictly speaking there is some nonzero hope given a considerable effort on my part, but this demand for effort gets crueler as the minimum effort gets greater and the odds get worse, and I'd put my odds low enough and the prerequisite effort for those odds high enough that that extreme example is, if not equal, then congruent.
Then again, of course that's what I'd hear, what I'd say.
But I want to jump out of my personal gripes, my uncharitability: whatever my dissatisfaction, your perspective is a good one to hold. Denying pity to people like me is a healthy social tool, as refusing emotional gratification to a few terminal sad sacks is preferable to letting someone with a decent chance at some (hopefully prosocial) goal give up prematurely. After all, for all you know I'm lying about my chances - either to you, or to myself.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2hr ago
Excellent post. I do have to say though, if my friend rocked up at my house, with my gun in his hand and said 'Dude, I just shot my wife and that prick she cheated on me with, the cops are coming, hide me!' and when I looked hesitant he said 'hey man if I end up in prison I might accidentally talk about the cache you have buried in the backyard', I would feel obligated to help him out, destroy the gun and give him an alibi. Not for his sake, for my own.
But then I would also hate my former friend and never trust him again and do my best to cut him out of my life asap.
orangecat
2hr ago
The far-right (which includes most people on this website)
I don't think you know what far right actually is...
And starting from (and assuming) that point pretty much forces people to prove that they're not an extremist (good luck proving a negative).
Can you explain what 'far right' is? And how I'm far right?
can't really detect any reasoning at all in decisions like this? How could the law possibly fail under heightened scrutiny[?]
Because falling under heightened scrutiny would produce the desired result. That's it.
Jackson can play the game. I find her unimpressive as well but she seems at least aware that her arguments should have, well, arguments. She knows the law ok and will go through with the ritual of tortured interpretations and equivocations to forward the Cause. The conservatives do this too; don't be blinded by agreeing with them. Although I would argue the current group are much better at it. Sotomayor doesn't care at all, nor does she put more than a token effort to try to hide it. Her writings look superficially like a considered legal decision, but even to a non-lawyer if you apply any scrutiny at all many of them completely fall apart into the absurd.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I watched the interview, I care about the possible cost of a war with Iran.
charlesf
2hr ago
As much as I support the norms here about charity and civility in communication, I have to agree as well. Just read some of Sotomayor's writing. I wasn't really following the issue at the time when the opening was being debated in the first Obama admin. Everyone knew that he was going to appoint a woman, and probably a minority, and I assumed that all the eligible judges were interchangeable. Then some time later I found myself reading one of her dissents entirely unprepared for the experience. I was appalled. This was obviously someone who had gone though life without ever having anyone correct her or challenge her on anything serious. She has a reputation as a bully which I 1000% believe. I wouldn't call her stupid in absolute terms; she's probably a bit above average for the nation as a whole. She was certainly very good at school and skilled at navigating bureaucracies. She probably would make an ok, or at least not totally disappointing local politician. A lot of people have accused a lot of justices of being concerned primarily with the results of their decisions, cleverly twisting the laws to produce the desired political victory for their side. She doesn't even both with the pretense of respect for the law.
By the standards of supreme court justices, she is stupid.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I enjoy the cocktail party version of this argument: the logical conclusion of the "potential persons" line is that men don't have the right to refuse consent to potentially fertile women. Women, of course, have a limited number of possible pregnancies and as such can maintain some right to choose their partners. But men are capable of impregnating at least once a day, so unless he's saving it for someone else when a man is offered sex by a potentially fertile woman he is obligated to accept, as otherwise he is destroying the potential for human life.
I actually have a chance to improve my station in life, which was famously not something peasants did frequently.
Social mobility has increased. I won't deny that. There's a lot of mitigating factors on what exactly that means, but in theory the next shitcoin bet I make can make me a billionnaire and there's few social stigmas that would go along me not being an aristocrat.
I could marry a black woman and not risk her being murdered.
I think you could go either way as to whether increased cosmopolitanism is a good thing or not. You can do certain things a homogeneous society can't and vice versa, at best it's a sidegrade.
I can say things that piss people off without being ostracized or jailed or killed (although this is steadily getting worse).
I personally know people that are disgraced, in prison and/or dead for doing that, so I find this claim unconvincing. It's as it ever was. Just with different idols.
I can vote despite not being rich or owning land.
And have basically no effect on how the affairs of your community are conducted because that has been thoroughly insulated from that particular ritual.
It is easier than ever to literally move around the world, both temporarily and permanently. I'm pretty sure peasants frequently literally weren't allowed to leave? Also if they moved somewhere else they'd just be destitute.
It's certainly has become far easier to move, but it was actually pretty common for peasants to move around, and the people who couldn't that you're thinking of, serfs, were specifically created as a class to prevent this problem for landowners or as part of specific cultural practices. Shopping around lords for a better deal is not at all unheard of.
Did peasants own land? I assume it depends on time and place but I thought that was the whole point of Lords.
It depends. Most did not outright but owned a perpetual lease. (much like people still do in the UK) Most of them owned their dwellings though (or at least their family did).
I'm so confident that peasants got drafted. Isn't that what peasant levies were? Did fighting age men get to opt out of wars? If so, why did any go?
The history of the practice is actually pretty complex, with early middle ages armies being more like bands of peasants called directly by kings. And the extent to which they were replaced by professional knights and men at arms is debated.
Still, it's pretty consensual at this point that for most of the period armies were composed of professionals fighting limited battles. With peasant levies filling more of a militia role or last resort stopgap than that of a real fighting force. Which I must concede is actually similar to how a lot of Europe treats conscription these days. Perhaps less so as military threats start to loom.
In contrast the the total wars of the modern era that would mobilize huge amounts of men and empty whole countries to the degree that it require women take over industrial production, it's incomparable. That level of discipline was simply impossible with the logistics of the time, and you have to go back to the empires of antiquity to find practices that compare.
Here's a nice article on the topic.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras...
I always feel like this is way oversimplified.
“There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy” -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I highly doubt a traditional culture has ever existed where most high-agency (read: upper class, free, generally attractive and fit) men reached the alter after their teenage years as virgins.
Assuming it were possible to settle such a bet, I would put considerable money down that no King of France ever reached his wedding night a virgin other than Louis XVI, and we know how that turned out.
Really, it's probably worse than that: if I asked the many Louis' and Francois' if they were virgins when they got married, they'd be confused by the question. "What do you mean virgin, I'm a man you fucking idiot?"
What we're dealing with is a result of a culture built around equality, of the classes and the sexes, and the results of that culture.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off. It was more a comment about her personality than her intelligence, and why Kagan would be better in the role of Kennedy-influencer. In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong. As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question, she gave a non-answer to a gotcha posed by Marsha Blackburn, who appeared less interested in determining Jackson's qualifications or judicial philosophy than in going on a rant about Lia Thomas and talking about how progressive education led to mind rot. Seriously, how was she supposed to answer? What could she have possibly said that would have satisfied Ms. Blackburn and earned her vote? From Lindsey Graham's questions about her faith to the softballs Democrats were lobbing, the whole thing was a dog and pony show, everyone knew this going in, and she was given specific preparation to not answer any questions if she could help it. Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Anyway, the reason for my comment wasn't to specifically say that you were engaging in boo-outgroup, just that it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity. I've been here since 2017 and I have yet to be modded once. I rarely report comments, though I also get pissed off when troublemakers decide to argue with the mods. Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
Of course, I don't do this, and if I did I'd probably be reported on a bunch, and I'd probably be given some leeway at first because of my history here, but eventually patience would run thin and I'd have to start eating bans. And whoever reported me and the mods would be correct to smack me for it, because, despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons, that isn't really productive and isn't the kind of discourse I expect here. So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with. Unless, of course, you're telling me that I'm perfectly within the rules to do that, in which case I won't do it all the time, but you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future.
I mean if we disagree on the facts we're surely not going to find agreement on their interpretation. We can drill down on a specific topic if you want, I hold my opinion on this topic to be fairly solid and nuanced, and backed by actual scholarship. But history being ultimately inaccessible to us, we may yet disagree forever, I'm fine with that.
But on exit rights, I speak from personal experience so I can just tell you how you're wrong specifically. I have attempted to live off the grid and succeeded to some degree, in more than one country. And my success has been inversely proportional to how liberal and modern the country in question is, and never total.
Consider the prospect seriously: if you want to live away from society you need enough land to subsistance farm, that's not a trivial amount and it requires some initial capital, so you need already be successful enough in modern society to afford it, as a luxury. I'm lucky like that, so it's on to the next step: you need to get that land and sever every tie you may have.
This is where it becomes impossible and if you genuinely try you end up like Albert Dryden or Vicki Weaver.
First of all there's the taxman, most places require that you pay something to the government for the privilege of owning land, if you don't produce enough to have an economic activity that's impossible and the inevitable man with gun eventually arrives. The good news is that the taxman is lazy, so you can live your whole life waiting for him, that's the story of Ed Brown. But that still means being imprisoned in your own home by the State ultimately.
Now assuming you find a nice tax free jurisdiction or make enough that that's never going to be a problem, comes the much more serious problem, and true enemy of the homesteader, and that's the municipal council. There's a building full of people whose sole job it is to prevent you from doing what we're proposing here, and as soon as they get a whiff that you're building a dwelling on your land, leaving a prebuilt or caravan on it for extended periods of time, or god forbid, engaging in agriculture, then they will send legions of cops, inspectors and various other officials your way.
Here you have a choice, either you comply or comply sufficiently that they leave you alone, making you tied to society in ways that strictly limit what yo can do and ultimately force you back into the system, or you ignore them like you did the taxman. The problem is that the councilman is not lazy. So when you start a war with them they do eventually send the men with guns to arrest you and/or kill you on your property.
Since I like to stay alive, my personal strategy to deal with this has been to leave for more enlightened shores that don't turn all ownership into renting from the government and where local officials are corrupt and lazy enough that they'll let you do whatever you want on your own land for a price.
That's still not really exit. But the Desert Trash lifestyle or equivalents is the closest that's practically possible.
And by the way, I have no qualms with technology qua technology. I find the internet to actually be tremendously useful in my ability to do these things. And I am not at all convinced that technology requires liberal states/empires to exist. Some forms of it certainly do. But not the ones I desire or enjoy.
I find it's not technology that stands in my way in the slighest. It's men and the nature of power.
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