domain:cafeamericainmag.com
hanikrummihundursvin
3hr ago
So much for meme history.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
Strictly speaking, I'd be happy with either. If I have to choose, the one who's actually my age. More longterm potential there.
faceh
3hr ago
Yes, I've zeroed in on college as a particular problem since it has compounding (negative) impact on a woman's marriageability and fertility. Four fertile years burned, racking up both debt and body count, for a degree that they may not use, and then they often opt to go for MORE schooling rather than enter a marriage or the 'real world.'
And of course it also creates the target-rich environment for the virgin poppers. Women from small towns, leaving their high school boyfriends behind, no parental supervision, tons of drugs and alcohol available, and both blatant and subtle nudges towards promiscuity all around.
Without some strong social pressure its almost impossible to expect women to resist for the full four years. And by the sheer numbers, most women don't resist. body counts at time of first marriage have steadily climbed.
So yeah, more supervision on the women is part of the the solution.
AND YET, removing some of these guys and deterring the rest would likely have an overall positive effect as well.
I mean, lets just use a fox and henhouse analogy. Yes, you guard the hens/eggs because they are dear, but if you catch a fox in the act, you still kill it. You don't want a whole population of foxes that are optimized for henhouse raiding to arise.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3hr ago
Or even worse, low class!
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr ago
Trump is proposing the drug companies sell in the US for no more than they sell in other developed nations. As far as I can tell, the drug companies could refuse to sell to other price-controlled nations and retain their US pricing that way.
Thanks. I was fairly sure SS would be obfuscating some relevant context, and in this case that includes the text. I'd agree with @DirtyWaterHotDog that this is a legal hammer setup. In this case, mixing something they know states will not refuse (FEMA grants), with something they know the Democratic coalition will struggle to restrain from (DEI / Israeli boycotts / illegal immigration).
Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.
Which, in turn, is not 'denial.' That is the provided framing, but there's no provided evidence that the goal is to prevent funding. If anything, it's a hook-setup, which is predicated on someone taking the bait, not refusing it.
Instead, the goal is almost certainly twofold: first, to use the power of the purse to lead state policy (which is very old practice), and second, to punish the states (and state politicians) that would take the money but violate the terms in the name of their political preferences, which would open them up to federal prosecution. The later is not possible without the funding occurring, and if a state insisted on refusing FEMA aid, I am confident the Trump administration would make political hay out of it until they did, on some general theme of how the refusing states are putting politics over lives (and taking the money).
Both of these, in turn, put the Democratic coalition in conflict with itself, by putting the fiscal interests of democratic political machines (the establishment politicians who need federal money, but also want to stay out of jail) against the partisan interests of the progressives (who want the shibboleths and the money, but care less for the Democratic establishment). Given what's already been written about the ongoing Democratic civil war, and the mid-term prospects, the worse the conflict of interests in the Democratic Party, the better.
This, in turn, aligns with the demonstrated practice of the last half year or so of how the Trump 2 administration has been baiting / luring political opponents into untenable positions, where it will happily gleefully enforce the laws against the opposition from a position of legal strength.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
Uh, no?
Would you care to explain exactly how you think being Haitian is comparable to Down’s?
No_one
3hr ago
Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking, while most men will find them attractive, to prefer them is more unusual.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
I don’t know that I’d call it “virtue-signaling,” but…what did you think “pro-life” meant?
67% aborted means 33% carried.
No_one
3hr ago
but liberal democracy is insufficiently "liberal" to be economically feasible then where we go next seems bad. I'd argue going back to the old ways.
a) It's not about economics.
I'd argue going back to the old ways.
Politics is the art of the possible. Saying impossible things are desirable is mostly useless.
Classical liberalism has all the electoral appeal of I dunno, raw oysters. Sure the right people will like it but you're still basically SOL.
I'd argue many people do, not economic reality.
In a big enough country, ideology and cope can paper over cracks in economic reality for a very long time. Heck this even works in a small country -consider Argentina! People can stay deluded for generations on end if they can. (e.g. society is rich enough because you're exporting money etc). Witness US education system which is mostly regressing.
erwgv3g34
3hr ago
I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.
Doesn't work. For every Lothario you execute, there will always be another one eager to take his place. Having sex with a bunch of nubile virgins is the ultimate reward. All you are doing is selecting for more impulsive, risk-taking cads. Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it:
Hating this guy is stupid. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. You have to control the virgins, not the poppers of virgins. Getting mad at the men will do no good. The women have to be restrained. Talking about how bad these men are is a distraction and irrelevance.
We have to implement virgin marriage, in that most women will have never slept with any man except the bridegroom before marriage. This is going to require alarmingly drastic coercion starting at a very early age. When a girl goes looking for a dicking she will find what she looks for. That is why we have to apply coercion to the girls, not the males. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. You guard what is dear, not what is cheap. The double standard is what works. If you do not have a double standard, you will not have children and grandchildren, and the state will not have soldiers.
And, yes, this requires SUBSTANTIAL oversight, which our society is optimized to prevent (starting with the institution of college, which is virtually designed to take young women away from the watchful eyes of their friends and families).
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
3hr ago
I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as "left-wing"
Being reflexively anti-right-wing is not the definition of left-wing, to the point he couldn't identify posts more friendly to left-wing thought.
ControlsFreak
3hr ago
Exactly what distinction did they make?
For example, the Constitution says:
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
There are no such additional distinctions for terms in 1A.
the problem is that if you mean "after the Constitution was written" you have no choice but to be arbitrary. If the Constitution just said "the military" you could claim that the Air Force only became part of the military after the Constitution was written
Where would be the part of your hypothetical Constitution where they distinguished between two separate things? This example just isn't analogous in any way.
You ask yourself "in what ways is the Air Force similar to an army and in what ways is it similar to a navy. Do what is appropriate based on the similarity."
So, uh... which category does the Air Force fall into, given the distinction above? I keep asking this question, and you keep not answering it. Is it an Army or a Navy?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3hr ago
If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking.
I mean, personally I'd probably drop two or three of those myself. If only because by defining "intelligence" so narrowly, you begin down the road of implying that every intelligent person must agree with you. But there is always the possibility that a person who seems closed-minded has seen further than you, and understands what an infohazard is. Or the person who seems unadaptable to you has seen further and understands what a maladaptation is. That one person's lack of "critical thinking" is another person who understands perfectly well what you are saying but still disagrees.
That said, you are correct about Turok.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3hr ago
I mean, I guess. On the other hand, how many Dunes do you have to write to be consider a good writer? Is one not enough?
FtSoA
4hr ago
I got in trouble the last time I curtly linked to a google search about the prevalence of AC units in Europe so I won't provoke the mods again.
But seriously why can't you simply google the relative prevalence of AC units in the U.S. vs. Europe and stop this pointless journey of "let's count the AC units one by one"?
This is not a hard problem. This is not a controversial issue with contested epistemic status. Data is available.
And it shows you are clearly wrong. By a lot.
Or, if it doesn't, be my guest and provide data counter to that I have already provided.
Dean
Flairless
4hr ago
I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent
PressXtoDoubt.jpeg
If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking. Turok consistently lacked them. Turok was a poster who was consistently unable to even re-state positions that were directly given to him, wildly off-base in his characterization of contemporary events or dynamics in the world, and regularly went off on tangents or tirades that were cliche decades ago.
He might have been articulate political brainrot, but he was still brainrot.
An unpopular belief of mine, although not tightly held, is that women really do NOT mature much when they hit their twenties. Nor are they asked or expected to.
So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible. Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall, because dating the 28 year old means you're getting someone who is maybe marginally more mature and put-together than the 21 year old... but with a lot more baggage that you'll be expected to carry.
And if you were present when all that baggage was acquired, hey maybe that's okay. But walking into a relationship with a 28 year old who has been through a series of negative relationships and hasn't figured out how her own decision-making contributed to the problem, you're now dealing with emotional trauma that you had no role in creating, and a woman who is provably not good at maintaining relationships. That's not appealing, especially if you're looking over and spot a 22-23 year old who hasn't yet lost the basic aura of innocence and doesn't hate the world (yet), and there isn't an noticeable maturity difference.
And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either. My brother was/is one of those. But guys, well, they're expected to mature and won't find their feelings coddled during that time.
FistfullOfCrows
4hr ago
Here's a neat game, open google maps street view and try NOT to see an external wall AC in a city.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
4hr ago
I've read the human hive one and the trilogy about the evil Brahmin clones. I think Herbert is just not a very good writer, Dune excepted.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
4hr ago
They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships... attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship
You've successfully discovered the psychological foundation on top of which "being a liberal" resides: being capable of decoupling X from the rest of the cultural baggage around X (and being disagreeable enough to point that out).
Unless you're in the 1970s (and even then), this is generally a liability, because the logical conclusion of that with respect to sex is "you're OK with fucking 7 year olds", a liberal of this type is ultimately being dishonest if he answers "no"[1], and everyone knows that (and you stated it anyway). This is also the genesis of the traditionalist's "it's a slippery slope from the gays to pedophilia" (but it's only really valid when criticizing classical liberals, which is why progressives appear to be immune to this type of criticism).
What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.
And the claim that this is "abuse" hinges on this point. As the risk incurred by having sex is nullified and the marketplace value of sex goes to zero (pornography helps with this), this fades into irrelevance, and "the woman wants to have sex, because having sex is neat" becomes the more salient point.
The fact that this is a childish view of sex is actually really relevant (and I do mean that in a literal sense; when kids- the kind closer to 7 than 17- have sex or do sex-adjacent things, I have it on good word that this is generally why they're doing them). Of course, this only results in a neutral to positive outcome if one or both of the participants can say "I'm done, and this sex was only fucking around", and in practice that's not guaranteed[2].
By contrast, a traditionalist or progressive will say that, because sex is the main thing of value women possess (for a bunch of deep-seated sociobiological reasons), that people being allowed to decouple sex from the cultural baggage around sex is devaluing sex -> destroying a woman's livelihood. And because the traditionalist viewpoint is centered around the willingness of men to pay top dollar for sex, and the progressive viewpoint is centered around forcing men to pay top dollar for sex, those types of people are going to argue that abuse occurs when you devalue sex in that way.
(Note that this doesn't actually consider the age of the participant- which makes sense; neither traditionalists nor progressives are particularly bothered about the subject's lack of age- for traditionalists, we can see that ages of consent higher than that are modern inventions so being married was the salient factor, and for progressives, they think 7 year olds can be meaningfully transgender.)
Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.
Only if you started from the traditionalist viewpoint: that the liberals are being dishonest about the above and trying to steal [literal] meal tickets from women. If a traditionalist did that, it would be a grave sin for them to do that: it would be exploitation, abuse, trickery given that they naturally understand sex to be a meal ticket in that way, so obviously, because everyone works like they do, the people not doing that must be lying. (Progressives do this too, just from the other direction because they started out in possession of the meal ticket.)
Of course, to the people who aren't lying about that but can't or won't acknowledge why the traditionalist viewpoint exists, that's going to cause some problems and damage their ability to trust traditionalist motives. After all, if the truth is one way, but they say it's the other way, then the only reason to do that must be hatred and stupidity... which, from the liberal viewpoint, it is.
[1] Which is why the more progressive-sympathetic liberals were very keen on the adoption of "consent" as a framework; it allows them to have their cake (we can do whatever we want) and eat it too (unless society has deemed the other partner sub-human), but is ultimately vulnerable to the fact that, when a society gets poorer and due to the fact the sexual marketplace is a marketplace, regulatory capture in the "declare competition illegal" direction occurs.
[2] Which is the main problem with fucking people who aren't necessarily able to judge that up front, or don't (in fact or perception) have the power to force a disengagement (which is why the "single mom's boyfriend discovered to be fucking the daughters too" thing exists, especially since the mother is herself making that calculation, consciously or otherwise).
That said, fucking people who don't believe they have that power, or are merely giving in, tends to result in dead-fish lays, which means the thing they "should" actually be after (described by faceh in a sibling comment) can't exist in that environment... which is an instant fail condition for someone genuinely interested in casual sexploration (and considering how obnoxious adult women are when they go passive like that, imagine how miserable that experience would be were it an actual kid on the other end- impressionability only goes so far). But that's basically just restating the slightly-hidden thesis that "molester/possessor" and "interested in casual/exploratory sex with for its own sake" are very different things.
faceh
4hr ago
Hmmm.
I can point out that pretty much every heterosexual male goes through a period where they're exclusively chasing 15, 16, and 17 year old girls. Its called puberty and/or high school.
And with that in mind, its actually weirder to think that a guy's tastes would change drastically as he aged, why wouldn't he continue to be physically attracted to the same things he was physically attracted to as a teen? Even if, as his brain matures, he can optimize for personality traits more than pure looks.
And a part of me sure wishes I had gotten around to banging more 15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket, but alas I was inconceivably ignorant of the signals women would send me... and I'm glad I didn't end up knocking one up and derailing my life plans.
And as discussed last week, I can imagine a world where a 16 year old girl might demonstrate sufficient understanding of the risks and sufficient brain development that she could legitimately "consent" to sex with an older guy.
But even then, I don't think society would look kindly on the guy that did that. There are in fact many 'normal' behaviors that are pathologized to avoid, I guess, a spiral into an unhealthy equilibrium where, say, 40 year olds are regularly snatching up 16-year-old girls and removing them from the dating pool that would otherwise allow teen boys a chance to get some experience.
FtSoA
4hr ago
When they do price fixing, it's bad. When Trump does price fixing, it's bad.
Trump's actions will make things worse, not better. He's not proposing something like I don't know we ban pharmaceutical exports to countries that refuse to pay market rates in order to make others pay their fair share. Imagine if he did that little bit of conflict theory! People would freak the fuck out and call him a mass murderer or something, but he'd be justified in threatening a trade war on that front such that America isn't paying for the bulk of innovation.
So this is a case where I think there is a Trumpian approach to perhaps make things actually better, but he's not doing that.
Yep, that's what got me as well. I remain amused how well I did with Asians and actual Africans. Real "wait, why do I know this?" feelings.
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