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The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
That said, I also think nuclear weapons are overrated, and while it's likely worthwhile to launch delaying tactics... once Iran has the bomb, what exactly are they going to do with it? Iran already knows that Israel has sufficient nuclear capacity to glass Iran
Israel does NOT have sufficient nuclear capacity to glass Iran. Israel is small and Iran is big, and that counts for a lot in the nuclear game. Certainly Israel could make Iran suffer with their dying breath, but they would still exist afterwards.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
I think it's very unlikely the IAEA action was caused by anything Iran did. Normally they bend over backwards not to find any violations. So I suspect pressure was applied to get them to make this declaration in order to provide justification for the desired bombings.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Well the Israeli government tried to do something about it in the 1970s/1980s. But turns out it's mighty unpopular at the ballot box to bulldoze the homes of your own people after you just won a war.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
But never their settlements in the West Bank, which do a lot of the heavy lifting in pissing people off.
faceh
2d ago
At a certain point, this market is not going to clear. We have reached that point.
Yeah.
One thing about the sexual marketplace for women. They're both an inelastic good... AND there's a fixed supply.
The supply can't increase very quickly, and heterosexual men will still have high demand for them even as the price creeps up.
Now we've got a large portion of women who have effectively set a 'price floor' for themselves that is above what many men are able to provide, and in many cases what men are willing to provide, given that many of the options on offer are also 'damaged goods.'
Throw in the evolutionary pressure on men to reproduce and there's just huge amounts of underserved demand.
The market is trying to provide substitute goods like porn, prostitutes, AI girlfriends, but I think the problem is that a good woman is a 'package' or 'bundle' of goods in one.
And most women now want to provide only a couple of those goods/services while still demanding the complete package on the other side.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
I was met with a question regarding my own stance on the matter.
I find if your goal is just to change the subject, saying that the history of the Mandate means that our input is uniquely unwanted by both sides, and that we should take the hint and butt out, works brilliantly. NPCs on both sides are horrified but have no comeback because you are off-script. It's like playing the Sicilian back in the days when everyone was taught opening theory starting e4 e5.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative.
No, this was the bill that made it a Federal legal requirement that women could get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. The idea that the opposite was universally the case before 1974 is a recent fabrication.
hanikrummihundursvin
2d ago
I'm aware, now please get in the box.
FtttG
2d ago
In your estimation, how many Palestinians have died of malnutrition and preventable illness since this war began?
Tree
2d ago
I for example am leaning towards kicking all the Islamic refugees out of Europe to the extent achievable under the law
That’s only common sense. But what if they refuse to leave, try to stab your women and children every chance they get, and teach their children to stab? At some point, you’ve done enough to preserve their lives, and the subsequent human rights infractions/butchery is not your fault. It’s like mowing down some japanese with sticks who refuse to surrender. That’s not murder.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
The Holocaust was obviously worse. It just contrasts extremely poorly when part of the founding mythos of the country is "we need a save haven for our people, who have suffered greatly" and then you look and Gazans are dying of malnutrition and preventable diseases purely because the Isreali's won't let food in.
History doesn't repeat, but it's definitely rhyming.
Random not very related thought, but the exact same logic applies more broadly to the hardcore lefty's, who are also the more irrational pro-palestinians. They all claim they hate the structures of power that perpetuate racism or sexism , but they don't actually dislike the structure, they just want their people at the top of it. Makes it hard to take them seriously.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
yet I'm increasingly falling in the delenda est camp just because the Israelis have proven time and time again that they are unwilling to compromise on their monomanic obsession to capture and subjugate
The Israelis withdrew from the Sinai; they withdrew from Gaza as well.
faceh
2d ago
Can't lie. At least part of my animus is from getting stuck behind people buying like 12 scratch-off tickets at a time, and oftentimes trying to claim winnings at the same time.
In my state you don't even have to scratch them off, the cashier has a machine they can scan the ticket on and tell you if you won or not.
At that point, where's any of the fun?
I know these folks would probably just find a way to get their jollies elsewhere, but seeing how gambling has penetrated every aspect of society now, I really do want to put this genie back in its bottle.
kky
2d ago
That would be a good top-level post, in my opinion, if you ever feel like fleshing it out. I suspect I personally disagree, with some caveats, but it sounds like you have something interesting you could argue for, and which would be well worth seeing the light of day.
Ping me if you do. I’d very much like to read what you have to say.
kky
2d ago
Oh, I didn’t do anything bad there, I just didn’t have any of the experience I needed to enjoy it. Going back much later and speaking the language well enough to hold a (simple, very patient on the part of my interlocutor) conversation, I’ve had a much, much better time with the country. And in retrospect, I would have liked to explore a less-overrun Kyoto more using those skills.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2d ago
if you're gonna fight a war , uncoordinated vassal swarm is a bad tactic because the AI will get defeated in detail
Sic semper those-who-invest-in-the-Diplomatic-Ideas-group
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
I agree. Also helped they were part of an actually productive civilization that had ethics and values which pushed them into prosperity
Also also they got shitloads of money to rebuild, which I think always softens attitudes somewhat.
An Indian Abroad: The Actually Not-True-Scotsman Ventures Down South
I had a rather eventful weekend, and what follows is somewhere in-between a travelogue and color commentary.
The UK is, at the time of writing, experiencing a "heat wave". This is rather loosely defined as temperatures above 27° C in England, and 25° in Scotland. To my Indian sensibilities, this is somewhere between amusing and ludicrous. I've run my AC at 24° without issue back home, and 27°C is a a nice day in spring where I'm from.
Still, hoofing it as I was with a backpack laden with clothes to the nearest rail station, I had to admit that it was hotter than usual. Enough to break out a sweat. I was on my way down south to England, to visit a distant cousin of mine after he and his girlfriend had been kind enough to spend quite a few hours driving up north to see me. I'd last been in Manchester sometime in 2022, but I hadn't had much opportunity to see the sights. I'd been there to give the final half of the PLAB exam that gatekeeps medical practice in the UK (for foreign grads), and had to rush back to India shortly after with my (now) ex. Still, while I hadn't known my cousin and his girlfriend that well back then, they'd been kind enough to offer us a room in his flat, and we'd hit it off, finding out that despite being raised in very different environments, we got along quite well. Indian currency doesn't go very far in the UK, and the savings alone were significant at the time.
While I've been in the UK for almost a year now, it's been spent up in Scotland. With a weekend free, I decided that now was a good time to see what the rest of the country had to offer during the summer.
I faced no end of difficulty along the way, the British train network isn't made of the same stern stuff as its estranged Indian counterpart. These rather unremarkable temperatures had caused one of my trains to give up the ghost, after I'd boarded the first leg of the trip. I did make it eventually, albeit quite harrowed and sleep deprived.
Manchester is a lovely city. Even the little I'd seen of it 3 years back had convinced me that it was far more to my taste than London was. The latter had seemed expensive beyond reason, and the extra culture not worth the expense. I'd lost much hair in the past over my ex's demands that we eventually seek to settle down there. Manchester, in contrast, was just about rich enough for my taste.
This impression was reinforced strongly while I was there. Much more nightlife, much more local color. In contrast, Edinburgh wasn't bad, but it felt far more condensed, with everything of note restricted to the city center or thereabouts.
We tried out a tapas place, a brand new experience as far as I was concerned. I'd only heard about them while watching La La Land, and had been frankly confused about the concept. Well, small plates and suitable for quick dates? The menu felt deceptive, while each dish seemed reasonably priced, you needed three plates or more per person to have a filling meal. The weather was great for outdoor seating at the very least.
The rest of the night was spent visiting a couple of the neighborhood pubs. I'd been to my fair share up in Scotland, but I seemed to always have the bad luck of visiting those with a clientele of mostly pensioners. These ones were far more hip, and I enjoyed listening to the explanations of how the pubs that aimed to cater to students versus those that looked for the after-work crowd aimed to differentiate themselves. A combination of cheaper drinks in the former, and less policing of what went on in the bathroom stalls in the latter (cocaine, that's what went on), as well as staying open past 11 for those that catered to students free from the rigid demands of a 9 to 5.
(At one of the pubs, the yuppie one, the bouncer demanded that I demonstrate what was in the rather large and bulky backpack I was lugging about. Clothes, that's what. I'd just gotten off the train.)
Unfortunately, when we finally retreated to their apartment that night, it was roasting. The building, while modernized in many respects, still had a Victorian superstructure. It went from bitterly cold in winter, to absolutely boiling in summer. I'd previously dismissed their complaints about the heat as Soft British moaning (his girlfriend is a local, and he's grown up there). Unfortunately, as we ascended the stairs towards their top floor apartment, it became clear that we were making a pilgrimage into a reversal of Dante's Inferno. The temperature climbed what felt like a degree each step, and their place could have been rented out as a sauna. It was conjectured that this was an unfortunate consequence of most British architecture being designed to hold in heat, and because all of the warmth rising through the floorboards ended up trapped on their level by a thick roof.
Cracking open the windows was little relief. There was only one per room, which made a cross-draft a distant dream. His English girlfriend was practically prostrated by the muggy heat, and even I, accustomed to the occasional day spiking into the 50s, felt less than comfortable.
I've previously lambasted the Brits as being too poor for air conditioning, but in all fairness, they might feel the need for it about a week or two every year. It's a tough sell, but their place just wasn't built for the other alternative, ceiling-mounted fans.
The next day was pleasantly spent visiting an assortment of cafes, and later on, some pubs. The former were not much to write home about, barring one that was very clearly a holdover from 2012. A lot of exposed brickwork and faux-incandescent lighting. Very quaint, or very tired, even Indian cafes that get on the bandwagon before the last stop had moved on.
The pubs were more interesting. One of them was the grungiest I'd ever seen, walls plastered with Indie rock and Alternative posters, some kind of gig going on in the basement, some of the bass making the floor beneath us shake even as the lyrics were filtered out.
It also had the dubious distinction of having a very seedy alley right next to it, treated as an extension of the pub by the locals. Hardly unsafe, since it was decently lit and populated by plenty of yuppies and teens with more than their fair share of tattoos. Yet it still reeked of piss, and we were pissed upon by a pair of AC units discharging their condensate right next to us. At least someone has air conditioning. The walls were scribbled over with graffiti crying out: "Free Palestine", and posters for various gigs around town.
I noted quite a number of middle-aged and beyond people clinging onto memories of youth. There was a pair of people who could easily have been grandparents, with about one normal set of teeth between them. Didn't stop granny from rocking a very short skirt while gyrating her arthric hips and ass against her partner's gummy smile. Very amusing.
A gentleman I'd spotted inside eventually came on out. A lounge lizard, if I'd ever seen one. Middle aged, rocking some kind of casual-ish suit I lack the sartorial sense to describe, but one that left plenty of chest hair poking out at the top. Slicked back hair, tastefully hiding potential bald spots. Prowling about looking for someone to seduce. He hadn't had much luck at anything except polishing off several martinis by the time we left.
A girl outside looked like she'd had enough. Very pretty, but with a hang-dog expression that conveyed either severe melancholy or black out drunkenness. My cousin's girlfriend expressed her sympathies, reminiscing about her own misspent youth, and nights where she'd been far too drunk for her own good. I noted the Lounge Lizard eyeing her, but she had a boyfriend on her arm, albeit one that looked about as faded as she seemed. I presume that the nearby gaggle of youngish people were friends, and would keep them safe regardless.
I felt slightly out of place, I must admit. At some point, not quite clear to me, we'd turned into "young professionals" as opposed to college students in the springtime of our lives. I couldn't pass as one of the kiddies grudgingly showing ID, nor could I quite empathize with pensioners seeking to find out quite how much coke they could do before their heart stops. Still, it's nice to actually have money, even if not quite as much time to spend it.
The night passed, though I wasn't quite sure how. I'd stayed up later than my hosts, and eventually realized I'd forgotten how to open the suicide windows all the way. Too late to wake them up for a reminder, so I spent the night tossing and turning in my tightie-whities. I've had worse.
The next, and final day, had been organized at my behest. At some point, I'd evinced interest in visiting the Royal Armories Museum (to meet the ever-entertaining Johnathan Ferguson), but was enthusiastically informed by my cousin that we had the Imperial War Museum in town. With a name like that, how could I not go?
It was a bit of a drive, and the exterior was uninspiring. Very 1990s, all angular slopes and little decoration to break them up.
The insides were rather interesting. I was a bit confused by the currently running exhibition, organized by a Punjabi lady and celebrating her experience of growing up in the UK as an immigrant. A lot of East meets West, leaning towards the East. Not particularly exciting to me, I'd grown up there.
I was rather amused by some of the 'artifacts' on display. Random religious knickknacks, devotional calendars. Holographic wall art of various deities, cheap junk jewelry and packets full of bindis. A lot of it was rather familiar, I might not be Punjabi, but the usual pan-Hindu cultural noosphere is very conserved. It was a microcosm of simpler times, one I'd been just about old enough to catch as it faded away.
I joked to my cousin that this display was rather incongruous, the equivalent of opening a "British experience" exhibit in India with an assortment of such unique cultural touchstones as a Henry The Hoover, the kind of paperback Bibles left to rot in cheap hotels, next to a can of bovril.
I'm still not quite sure what any of this had any business doing in a War Museum, but I guess they have to fill the space somehow.
The actual meat and bones, relating to real conflict? That was far more interesting. This place seemed to restrict itself from WW2 all the way till modern day, if you excuse the fact that Great War on Terror has been past its prime for almost two decades now.
I geeked out over various exhibits, reading random journals, looking at the knives and guns. I'm more of a modern day combat fan, but there's still some charm in 13-pounder cannons (quickly found out to be obsolete at the beginning of WW1), Lee-Enfields and pilot mittens from more genteel times, when Real Men fired pistols at each other while flying at motorway speeds.
Despite the imprecations not to touch any of the exhibits, I did cop a feel of a decommissioned nuclear bomb. Very nice.
The mockup of an Engima machine was out for maintenance, so I went for the most interactive exhibit around: a WW2 tank simulator, with 3 different stations meant for multiplayer fun for the whole family.
A bunch of kids were having a great time, the youngest boy yelling at his older sisters to figure out the controls to move and fire the gun, while he was stuck with the boring old job of loading it.
When they were done, I went ahead, but found myself alone, and decided to flex my chops by single-handedly running all 3 stations by myself. I finished in record time, the mockup Tiger no match for my skills. Rather charming, but the sim had an abysmal frame rate and seemed to be based off a game engine that had been cutting edge in 1999.
Eventually, a full audiovisual presentation began, some kind of over-wrought documentary about the cost of war. I'd already finished seeing everything worth seeing by then, so I settled for shitposting to my Arma 3 buddies and apologizing for not being able to visit despite passing through York.
("They made the HMS Proteus from Arma 3 into a real thing!" I declared, while taking a snap of a model of a nuclear submarine. My player base was intimately familiar with all kinds of unholy shenanigans I'd managed to run with the model in-game, despite it being a static prop.)
There was a molten girder from the WTC on display, thankfully cleaned of residual jet fuel if not a ton of rust. A little personal, that one, I'd been atop one of the Twin Towers a mere week or so before the planes hit.
What else was there of note? Well, a Women In War section, which thankfully didn't stray entirely into "war declared, a million men dead, women and children most affected" territory. A preserved Harrier jet, you think you know how big those are until you're next to them in person, most jets rival school-buses. There was a proto-typical Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carrier from Rhodesia, looking very much like it would fit into the Dishonored franchise.
Not much else to say, really, but I had a decent time.
The rest of the day was spent visiting my cousin's parents. Had to do my duty as an Indian, after all. Lovely people, and they absolutely stuffed me with more food than I could shake a stick at, and stuffed more into my hands to help me survive the train ride home. At some point, I found out that my "cousin" and I were more distantly related than we thought. We were both very bad about keeping track of the tangled web of terminology that wrapped around our hundreds of relations, and had been under the impression that we were second cousins, with a common great-grandpa.
Nope, the line had diverged another grandpa back, making us third cousins. This caused a bit of an existential breakdown, and I dejectedly asked my cousin if he wanted me to pay him rent. He declared, referring to some online calculator, that we only had 1% of our genes in common, we were barely related!
1% of our genetic variance, I retorted, pointing out that we shared 50% of our total genetic material with bananas. He was kind enough to concede without charging me the rent, or rescinding a prior request that I be the Best Man at his upcoming wedding.
I suppose it was a rather important 1%, given that we could pass as actual cousins, barring his love for suits on all occasions and me trotting around in lovingly preserved floral print.
Stuffed, we finally drove back to his place. Along the way, I'm not quite sure how, the conversation diverged into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think the triggering factor was his casual question about how Indians felt about the conflict, and my response that we tended to support the Israelis because of the simple fact that they weren't Muslims. I explained that despite this, in liberal upper-middle class circles back home, the trend was towards vocal support of the Palestinians. They nodded in agreement, and expressed that that's the way that they, and all folk of good character leant.
I was met with a question regarding my own stance on the matter. A rather uncomfortable question, given that I'm rather pro-Israeli and wouldn't really give a shit if Gaza was turned into a glassy parking lot. I respect them for creating an oasis of technocratic superiority in what is, by default, a sandy hellscape that proves that, despite claims on Reddit, even the "Land of Milk and Honey" has an expiry date. I've got nothing against Muslims, per se, I get along fine with them, and would even call another, slightly older, Pakistani colleague a good friend.
I knew this was the wrong answer, so I tried to hide my power level by stating that I was slightly more positive towards Israel.
This was still clearly an inappropriate response. My cousin thoughtfully declared (in the mindset of setting straight a relative Fresh off the Boeing) that in British circles, at least around our age, support for Palestine was the only option within the Overton Window. I quite truthfully said that I didn't want to misrepresent myself (more than I had to).
This still caused offense. His girlfriend declared that Israel was a genocidal bully, murdering and beheading children and starving millions. How could I not possibly condemn them? Well, I said, somewhat honestly, I'd grown up in a country where thousands of children starving or dying in conditions less humane than refugee camps was a sight I could see on a whim, or against my desires not to. This threw her for a bit of a loop, but she declared that it was the business of good people to still try and appreciate the severity of Israel's sins. I said that was easier said than done, I, likely most Third Worlders, was rather jaded by the horrors I'd seen and taken for granted. If I could see open sores and far-too-thin children on the streets where I lived, without burning the place down, why would I come to an entirely different country and make a fuss about events half a continent away?
She complained about how Israel had used the October attacks as a pre-text to engage in the "genocide" that was still ongoing. A mere six hundred Israelis had died, she said, and yet they'd killed 50,000 Palestinians without showing any inclination to stop.
I really didn't want to push the point. Real life isn't quite the Motte, and my immediate arguments, namely that Hamas was an insurgency using the civilian populace as a shield, that the average Palestinian supported them, or that it was futile to expect a "proportionate" response after kicking the bear in the nuts, weren't worth the pain.
My cousin took a more considered approach, complaining that the Brits had caused this whole mess by importing Jews into a homeland they'd ceded thousands of years back. Wasn't it only fair that they make up for their error by taking a stronger stance in condemning the ongoing atrocities?
I was comfortable claiming that this was a myopic perspective, once the Jews were there and the British gone, who exactly had attempted to massacre all of them? Who had tried to push them out from a river to the nearest body of salt-water? I found the most traction by, once again, quite honestly, throwing up my hands and declaring that both sides had blood on their hands and were locked in a cycle of violence with no obvious off-ramp. There are few more inadequate equilibria. I did point out that Jews were flagrant hypocrites by still using the Holocaust as a shield to deflect modern criticism, I'm no fan of being a partisan who doesn't judge arguments on their merits, or of naked hypocrisy (I feel somewhat ashamed about mine). This seemed to mollify them, albeit I still felt some fading radiation of disappointment at me for not seeing the Right Side of History.
Try as you might to simply see the sights and have an enjoyable weekend, the Culture War still comes for you. Even when conveyed through very friendly, kind and otherwise quite sane friends and family. Sometimes you find out that your blood ties aren't quite as close as you'd thought, sometimes it's your political views. Today, I found out it's both. C'est la vie, if you'll pardon my French.
I've never found comparisons between how the Nazis treated the Jews and how the Israelis treat(ed) the Palestinians to be even remotely persuasive. The Holocaust was cold-hearted systemic murder on an industrial scale, whereas the Israel-Palestine conflict looks exactly like every other interminable conflict in the Middle East or North Africa for the last ~100 years. Even the much-ballyhooed apartheid legislation in Israel, in which Palestinians are subject to different legislation to Israelis, is also true of e.g. Syria.
“The damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).
I don't have an issue with everything else you said (other than it being a theory, rather than evidence), but I don't know how to process the last decade or so of my life, without "mind control works" being somewhere in the top conclusions. It's not just women, though. Men have proven themselves to be at least as susceptible.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
You break the country and the people decisively, and you relocate the survivors, and a few generations later you have a rough peace.
I'm not sure what aspect of horseshoe theory is at play here, but I never thought this would be the topic that we both agreed on
hydroacetylene
2d ago
It's also only a reliable signal of malfunction in men, since there are no male gendered clothes except maybe boxers
While it’s not controversial anymore for women to wear pants in broader society, men’s and women’s pants are definitely a thing.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Work vans are far more common than work pickups in the USA. ‘White van man’ is not a usual American phrase, but everyone here understands what it means. The reason is obvious- it’s harder to break into the back of a van than a pickup bed.
Pickup trucks are the single most common vehicle in red/hispanic areas. It comes off as masculine and respectable(some form factor of success, maturity, decent behavior) for cultural reasons. Remember the American concept of masculinity, even upper class masculinity, is much bigger on ‘can personally go and do work’ than in the old country and utilitarian-but-not-really pickups make sense in that mold.
Doesn't matter, Hamas would already destroy the US given half a chance.
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