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Yes Evangelical churches are growing in a large part because they are scooping up converts from the collapsing mainline denominations. Religion as whole in the US is still declining, but the Evangelicals do present an interesting data point as the rest of US mirrors the secularization of Europe and Evangelicals don't It's possible that the Evangelicals stop the tide or even reverse it. My guess is they'll hold steady they have a high fertility rate but a high defection rate of the youth and secular culture has a strong pull. They are also massively less influential than they were in the 80s and 00s and they'd have to work pretty hard to get that power back.
faceh
4d ago
Why would they continue to work on 'productive' labor when there is no actual purpose to doing so?
I mean that literally, why would they do more than the bare minimum, enough to keep their electricity and internet on?
Why would they do any job that carries any amount of risk or requires excess hours of their time?
And, of course, why wouldn't they just vote for the most radical political candidates in the meantime?
Its prevalent enough in Japan already that they have a term for it: Herbivore men..
Consider that there are two types of 'fuck you' money.
Being filthy rich so that you can afford to lose a bunch of it.
And being so dirt poor that you have nothing to lose and thus don't care about losing.
The only real suckers in this scenario are the guys stuck in the middle class doing most of the productive work and paying taxes whilst receiving very few benefits back.
Yes you aren't now, but if current trends hold (always a big if) TradCaths are going to be so wildy out of step with society morally and socially that I expect the gap to widen. In 200 years I don't see the West being more sexually conservative given that we've been liberalizing since the enlightenment. There's a lot of stuff grandfathered in but when todays Zoomers are grandparents I think it will be a lot harder for practicing Catholics to mesh into society.
FtSoA
4d ago
If Russia’s goal has been to take the secessionist regions, as was their initial claim, the lack of further territorial advances would be expected.
That was very much NOT their initial claim and ignores that whole "drive to take Kiev" campaign debacle.
It's steelclowning to retrocon that "Russia didn't even want to take the whole country in a rapid victory anyway so this is all fine actually."
Russia, even if they're winning and on track to achieve more limited goals, has not been easily winning. If Russia had been consistently inflicting significantly disproportionate losses on Ukraine this whole time the war would have already ended.
Russian military performance has been embarrassing. Their economic performance has not.
Gaashk
4d ago
To be clear, neither my mother, nor I, nor the friends I can think of married a man who had, from the start, what you would call a career, or was making that kind of money. My mom's mother gave them money for a down payment, because my dad was never going to have it himself.
Ultimately, I think it's more important to signal potential love and commitment, but that's more subject to specific circumstances, and making more money is also nice for other reasons, so it's a safe thing to focus on.
No, "roommates" in this sense is people who share the same house but have their own rooms.
In the old days, people who only needed a single room could instead live in a single room occupancy (e.g. Judy's apartment in Zootopia), but ever since we decided to make those illegal, anyone who cannot afford a studio has no choice but to move in together and rent individual rooms in a house or apartment, with all the attendant friction and problems.
(This is one big reason I still live with my mom; if I have to have a roommate anyway, who better than my mother who loves me? What's the point of moving out just to become roommates with a stranger?)
This is just your insecurity talking.
Yeah sure. And if you have a job applicant whose resume shows 12 different jobs in the past 5 years, none of which lasted more than 3 months, they're 'insecure' if they pass you over for an applicant with a more stable history, right?
(hint: it shows trouble actually committing, i.e. a red flag).
Nobody is obligated to be 'secure' about promiscuity, that's laughable to even suggest. Its about the one thing we are genetically wired to BE insecure about.
Which is to say, your comment reads like satire.
but 6-12 is perfectly normal in this day and age.
And it was less normal in the past.
Granddad had a 64% chance of marrying a woman with only 1 or fewer sexual partners.
Guys now have a 27% chance, at best.
Strangely, more people got married back in granddad's day.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I'm thinking in terms of various camps, fake "research opportunities" to pretend your kid is doing science and shit, expensive non credit non graded college summer programs that pretend to be classes at a school, travel programs abroad that masquerade as charity work programs with no deliverables to help you write a college essay. That's more the kind of stuff gunner kids do in high school rather than get a job.
I don't think the time when Asian kids are made to learn violin overlaps much, if at all, with the time kids get summer jobs in high school. If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.
And for that matter, while I agree that music is a good thing to do with one's time, I genuinely think having a job is a better more enriching experience. I think a warehouse job will teach a kid more than a summer biology program at Brown will.
rae
4d ago
Look a single dude straight in the eye and say "Yeah she's banged 6-12 dudes prior to you, but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance and YOU'RE the one she's going to stick with" with a straight face.
This is just your insecurity talking. You're afraid that you might be worse off in some way than a previous partner, and thinking of sex like it's a "performance" instead of viewing it as a mutual exploration of intimacy, pleasure, and most importantly, as a way to bond with your partner.
Also 6-12 partners, those are rookie numbers. Like I could understand being weirded out by your partner having over 50 hook-ups, but 6-12 is perfectly normal in this day and age.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4d ago
COD and Insurgency, while not quite as "Number Shooter" as say, Destiny, are still not that far.
You have small maps, predictable spawns and player behavior, and a constrained set of weapons. Said weapons can be somewhat easily modeled with DPS being the only really relevant property.
I play a lot of Arma, and you're not going to be able to do that. The bigger the playing field, the wider the space of strategies, the more simulationist the modeling..
You will have a hard time min-maxing Arma for the same reason nobody has solved IRL war, despite the obvious extreme optimization pressure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
By 30 one can absolutely be a teacher, forklift operator, or cop. In fact I think in most places you can't become a cop much after 30. 18-30, which I guess is what you mean by under 30?, captures a huge number of men (about 16%) who are in college, and effectively earn nothing.
Yes these men are single for any number of reasons. Do we ask the same question about your million good women? ((I should note that my age range for the men was under 40, as it seems like more of a match))
If a lot of these men were gay, it would just make my point even better, there would be even fewer straight men competing for those good women. I don't think women care about past divorces in a man.
None of your objections answers the questions raised: what part of this do you think is either not a thing your hypothetical good woman would look for, or not a thing under the control of the men? Sure most men don't meet these standards, THAT'S THE POINT. And you can do it easily!
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
As far a China — I’ve no doubt that most elites or potential elites are on very similar lists.
I’ve wondered about that. I think blackmail schemes might have less value in unfree countries when you can just have your enemies executed for “corruption” or mysteriously fall out a window.
oats_son
4d ago
No, that can happen to any game. Call of Duty 1 and Insurgency, for example, everyone knows the spawns and the approximate travel times, so have fun eating a rocket or grenade within 5 seconds of spawning and running out.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
It's not just intelligence. It's things like propensity to violence, conscientiousness, time preference, etc.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4d ago
DOTA2
This strategy guide for DOTA2 players is the best around. Hope that helps!
Mushguffler
4d ago
What's a "rafa"?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4d ago
One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.
That's an artifact of playing Number Shooters (where enemies are transparently walking sacks of hitpoints you're trying to subtract), or Number RPGs/looter shooters where you're just trying to make Number Go Up. Everything can be easily reduced to metrics like DPS, to the detriment of having a game at all.
I'm grateful that I prefer my games to operate in a manner that obfuscates the fact that it's all 1s and 0s on a storage drive, and which remain fun even if you're not playing them like you're a glorified SAT-solver.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4d ago
If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone
If I want my (hypothetical) kids to be doctors, then I'd need to quite a bit of faith that there are Amish communities running around in 2050. I really don't see how it's feasible to be entering that profession otherwise, that's just not the way things are going.
One might argue we're already over Peak Doctor, we just don't know it yet. I certainly wouldn't want to even be just a bright-eyed student entering med school in the Year of Someone's Lord 2025.
At the end of the day, I'm strongly of the opinion that there's no point in worrying about the state of education if you're someone who has only young kids or no kids at all. Formal education as we know it will very likely not exist by the time they'd be old enough for it, and if it does, it'll likely just be entirely signaling as opposed to 75% signaling.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4d ago
Why then has Russia not made significant territorial gains in so long? I don't understand why the Ukrainians haven't collapsed already if it's so lopsided against them, even when they have a defender's advantage tactically.
If Russia’s goal has been to take the secessionist regions, as was their initial claim, the lack of further territorial advances would be expected.
(There are, of course, other possible explanations.)
FtSoA
4d ago
Ukrainians have suffered drastically higher casualties than Russians
So, in your view, the war has actually been going way better this whole time for Russia than Ukraine in terms of efficiency/losses?
Why then has Russia not made significant territorial gains in so long? I don't understand why the Ukrainians haven't collapsed already if it's so lopsided against them, even when they have a defender's advantage tactically.
Your allegation is that ISW is making it up? How does all this square with identifiable vehicle losses? Why can't Russia establish air superiority?
How many more months need to go on before you think the CSIS analysis is more correct than "Responsible Statecraft's" about the present state of affairs? What is "deteriorating fast" here?
You should read this article by retired US officer, not some 'international relations' pukes.
Funny, that's how I feel about an establishment that employs Trita Parsi at all, let alone as management.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4d ago
As a man whose girlfriend is addicted to her phone, I’m telling you that it’s actually a blessing in disguise. She puts much fewer demands on my time than the non-addicts I’ve dated, because she is capable of entertaining herself rather than pestering me for validating attention every 10 seconds.
And it’s not as if I entered the dating pool in pursuit of riveting conversation in the first place.
aqouta
4d ago
It's not a kind thing to say, but anything over a little pudge is actively revolting to me.
jake
4d ago
CPT apropos Epstein is the easiest way for frothing antisemites, e.g.; Andrew Torba, to cloak their animus in something ostensibly reasonable. Torba is clear about what he thinks, it's his motivations he gets to hide. Today he's playing panican on X. He isn't mad because he believes in a general sexmonster conspiracy being swept under the rug, he's mad because he believes jews orchestrated that sexmonster conspiracy (as if American politicians were famously free of deviancy before) and if unmasked we could finally begin expunging their influence and usher in a new American golden age.
I think Epstein was an op, just one that equally implicates multiple nations. Pizzagate was something entirely separate, but the righties have their wires crossed thinking these were all one thing. Epstein's Island involved 16/17 year old girls, and rarely 16/17 year old boys, being paid to have sex with various wealthy and powerful men. Pizzagate involved high-power dems and DC figures, among others, raping children who were then probably quite often murdered. One involves an activity legal in all of Europe where the problem they would have is that money changed hands. It is a simple taboo that we should punish as it functions as a critical test for good socialization, I just can't pretend there's anything actually unusual about a man wanting to have sex with a 17 year old girl. The other, as we all know and as Greer notes here, is a problem universally agreed upon as solved by woodchippers. They're not on the same planet of severity.
kky
4d ago
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Is the argument here that you should ape the wealthy regardless of your own norms and values, or that striver Asians are universally living good lives? If it's the latter, color me surprised, a lot of them are IME quite angry about the whole situation and hate/fetishize whites to a pretty uncanny degree. Is that the aim here?
But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."
Going further, it's bad to raise your kids in some way or another because someone else told you to. On the other hand, it's good to raise them in that way because you personally believe it to be a good thing.
There's not a lot of meat on this bone. You very briefly mention the kinds of reasons why people might want their kids to try their hand at working before leaving the nest. You do not engage with them in any depth, and your refutation stops at saying "this is stupid." OK, in that case, what is the good life that these parents should aspire to providing for their children? You got something, right? The only thing I'm hearing is "genetic confounding" which, when I plug it into ChatGPT, comes out as "do nothing and trust the plan." Otherwise, this post is effectively just "explain to me why you'd want your kids to go working" with a lot of unearned snark.
No.
I have a generalized model for Western Women:
I'm actually frustrated that they AREN'T acting more different than men, and eschewing the one role that men can't actually fill.
Yes, indeed, all a woman has to do to be considered 'fit' is 'not be obese.' Just don't be obviously and grotesquely fat.
AND YET, they're still the more obese gender.
I don't know what to tell you man, they have an overall lower bar, and many of them don't even try to clear it.
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