domain:furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4d ago
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
Seething about people having an inferiority complex. That's the kind of irony I come to the motte for.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
You said you're single. Have you thought about putting your interest in larger women to work?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Well, appealing for me, at any rate!
(Not the single mom part though. That's one of the few things that actually is a hard limit for me.)
Grant_us_eyes
4d ago
Or, if you wanted to meet in public with other people, you basically had to do a voluntary pledge of allegiance to specific political policies.
I don't think I'll ever forgive some people for that.
daguerrean
4d ago
Is it untrue in many cases? Sure. Like it would also be untrue in many cases to say that playing Russian roulette "will destroy your own life". It was shorthand for: will dramatically increase your chances of destroying your own life. The population that ends up in the foster/adoption system is not a random sample of the population. But I suppose if you and your partner are of that same genetic quality then adoption vs biological is six of one, half a dozen of the other.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.
The article notes one reason why:
One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.
Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.
The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.
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?
Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. 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." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
So you see, the gudness of the git gudder matters not, because people will always just reject the message anyway. But it matters not. "Git gud" always reigns supreme in the end, for it is the truth.
I think fat girls are sexy af, so I'm biased, and I'm aware my biases are not shared by everyone. But, it can't be that bad, right?
This is almost indistinguishable from advice sarcastically attributed to tradcons. "Men, you need to git gud, and you need to be willing to marry overweight single mothers!" Boy, what an appealing reward for gitting gud.
Shrike
4d ago
I don't think that this is true – non-denominational churches (which I would think are often but not always right-wing evangelical coded) are actually growing. And attending evangelical types typically have a positive tfr, IIRC.
Some groups (like the Southern Baptists, IIRC) are undergoing narrowing (perhaps temporary as Baby Boomers and the Silent Gen decline?) and of course retention rates are not perfect (so a high tfr does not guarantee continued adherence.) But I think that modeling a mild downturn in attendance to infinity is as naive as modeling a mild upswing to infinity.
Regardless, just going by current trendlines, I think we can expect evangelicals to continue to be a "live player" group. They're often overlooked in favor of the Amish or tradcaths because the Amish are basically a far-group to most internet users and tradcaths have a lot of momentum, so they are more fun to talk about, while evangelicals' day in the sun ended with Bush 2, but evangelicals never actually went anywhere.
I wouldn't necessarily predict it but I think there is actually a very good chance that evangelicalism (defined broadly, and perhaps throwing in a few Protestant denominations that wouldn't consider themselves evangelical but nevertheless have many of the same characteristics) is actually the Religion of the Future in America. Very plausible to see them cannibalizing the mainstream denominations as they enter tailspins, pick up tradpilled younger Gen Zs, and make massive inroads into traditional Catholic territories.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
4d ago
I think you meant to respond to @Hoffmeister25 above.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Would you feel better to know that I know an affluent white couple having the exact same terrible experience with a white child adopted from methbilly parents? No racial angle at all (the adoptive father is even from a similar borderer-descended background as the child). Yet nurture is still failing horribly and it's a coin toss whether the kid ends up in prison by his late teens.
faceh
4d ago
Because female bodies have value, and male bodies do not
Yeah. But as the TFR rates are showing, women largely aren't doing the thing that actually makes their bodies valuable.
Whilst men are still using their bodies to do all the work that actually lets us maintain some level of civilization.
Yet another asymmetry. And not due to men's failings.
who said that she felt like she's the one who has to settle, so, maybe the grass on the other side isn't as green as you think it is.
I think that you're kind of proving the point, because a woman has to settle for grass that's less green than she'd like.
A guy has to settle for, metaphorically, starving to death.
The alternative to getting their ideal partner for women is getting a guy they find unattractive.
The alternative for guys is... nothing.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Anyone on the Motte practice Tarot? I've dabbled in it for the past year, but looking to a go a bit deeper in terms of interpretations and understanding of the cards.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Again, why is the onus on the men to settle, here?
Because female bodies have value, and male bodies do not. You belong to the less valuable half of the human species. We just had a whole ass thread on this.
Although it should be pointed out, said thread also included a post from a woman who said that she felt like she's the one who has to settle, so, maybe the grass on the other side isn't as green as you think it is.
thejdizzler
4d ago
I have two roommates. Everyone in the Bay Area has like 7. Get Better Soon is a bit out of it IMO.
chooky
4d ago
Are roommates just not a thing at all anymore, or is anyone with one now undateable? If so, is this because of the current lack of roommate-driven sitcoms starring attractive people a la Friends?
I feel like "housemates" is still pretty dateable, especially in expensive cities.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
I don't see how anybody is expected to do it if they haven't already these days!
I mean it's not that bad.
I was at a wedding for an early 30s guy not too long ago. Perfectly unremarkable dude in every way. Average looks, barely a penny to his name, floats in and out of odd jobs. But he's genuinely pleasant and easy to talk to, and he knows people everywhere, and I mean everywhere, he will be in random states he's never been to before and he's still bumping into people he knows. When you talk to a lot of people and play the numbers game then it's easy to meet potential partners.
The bride was admittedly a chubster, which is apparently the kiss of death for a lot of people here, but, c'est la vie.
Possible. But obesity would have to be her only disqualifying factor.
Oh, did you know there's research showing that obese women aren't willing to date obese men? Even though most obese men would settle for an obese women?
Women are the ones judging obesity (in others) harshly.
Again, why is the onus on the men to settle, here? That's not the source of the asymmetry.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
The two most interesting motte posts that shaped my views on the dating world were one by a poster who I don't think posts here any more, who made an argument that the sexual revolution can't be inherently responsible for the male-female happiness gap because such a large gap is present only in the United States and not in Europe, where the revolution happened even more strongly; and @Terracotta linking a chart that showed the massive climb in obesity in the US, suggesting that if you're looking for a woman who does not qualify as obese or overweight, you're limited to the top 25% of women -- who, of course, are interested in similarly-top men.
Both of these convinced me something funky is going on in the US in particular, and that the obesity crisis, as well as general physical fitness (young men don't have muscle like they used to), are responsible for the unique unhappiness of American dating.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
I do, but you don't. Telling people "git gud" without any notion of how they do is less than worthless. You don't even have proof that they can. Who do you point to to show it's possible, if not yourself?
Can I let you in on a little secret? You know what me and my married friends sometimes talk about? We aren't bragging about how much better than our younger contemporaries we are, or patting each other on the back about how we "got gud". We talks about how fucking lucky we are to be 40 and married, and not 20 or 30 and single. That we met our spouses before swiping, and tiktok. Before Andrew Tate. On both sides! Men and women both are clinging to their spouses like the last lifeboat on the Titanic, because it doesn't take a genius to see how utterly fucked the dating landscape is. The sheer hellscape of modern dating and gender relations has probably done more for the security of my marriage, and many others, than anything else.
I'm on the other side, and even I don't see how anybody is expected to do it if they haven't already these days! Y'all are fucked.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
It's a pregnancy risk, sure, but, life's full of risks. One of my ex's whole family was fat af, and they managed to reproduce.
Maybe next time before you pass on a fat girl, you could give her a chance for a little while, with the idea of suggesting Ozempic or an exercise plan once the relationship is more established? Just a thought. Could help widen your pool of available options a bit.
faceh
4d ago
I want to know that society isn't going to collapse because nobody was willing to be a little mean to women, mostly.
After decades of giving women more and more benefits, why wouldn't the solution entail withdrawing some of them? And if we try that and it doesn't really help, at least we can say we tried.
Let it be known that I was expressing these same sorts of concerns back when I was with my Ex (I can drag up my posts on the Reddit Motte from like 5 years back to prove it), and I would still express these concerns if I got a new stable relationship.
I can see possible solutions to my personal problem, I sure do wish that certain other people would stop actively making it harder, though.
But I would really, REALLY like to avoid what seem to be eminently predictable outcomes of ignoring the larger issue.
faceh
4d ago
is it really that much of a dealbreaker?
If you want kids, its a concern.
ESPECIALLY if you want those kids to be raised to be healthy themselves.
Of course, Ozempic is giving us a chemical solution to all this.
And I am not asking for a rail thin girl, or a muscular one, or even one that goes to the gym regularly.
Just one that actually considers health important and takes necessary steps to maintain it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
You don't actually know how to "git gud".
Ah, but I never said I did! All I said was two simple words: "git gud". You see the difference, yes?
Sorry buddy, Rambo rules apply, you drew first blood. Your whole post was spurred by a single dollar estimate taken totally out of context from that poor guy’s Substack, and what he was saying has zero bearing on anything you said. In reality, he could have said anything at all, it didn’t matter what, you would have read whatever you wanted out of it. That’s why it’s all about you. You don’t need to make it about yourself explicitly; your post is saturated with yourself. You couldn’t even keep it down enough to read what the guy wrote! No protesting, I brought receipts.
If you want to complain about Society, do it on your own. Don’t twist other people’s words into it.
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