domain:betonit.substack.com
Harlequin5942
6m ago
In the feminist mindset, rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust, and hence it is quite disconnected with a woman's attractiveness.
No_one
7m ago
Why? He's a Mexican. You think if he grew a beard and went into Mexico and became a normal person with a normal job, he'd be in trouble ? Or you know, that he'd be widely recognized in the US offline if he changed his looks a bit ? Guys can always grow a beard. If it worked for a war criminal who was actually a fugitive, in a country one fiftieth the size of the US, not just out of favor, it should work for Nick.
Or that he couldn't get hired in the US in a red state by someone who isn't affiliated with America's ideological police, the misnamed 'EEOC' ? , so any small company ?
Harlequin5942
8m ago
it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode
You don't think many teenage girls rank male classmates?
I remember ranking boys in terms of cuteness (albeit ordinally rather than quantitatively) being a repeat conversation among some girls from age about 11 onwards. How else can you work out which boys you can date without getting bullied?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10m ago
concerning rise of Anti-Catholic sentiment in The United States
I see where you're coming from, but the history of anti-Catholic animus in the United States isn't short: you could point to reactions to Irish and Italian immigration, or more recently Hispanics. The Klan was, among many other things, anti-Catholic. Things like arson of churches (some Catholic) isn't unheard of even today.
And I say this as not-a-Catholic. On the other hand, we largely seem to have overcome this bias, and few seem worried about Biden's allegiance to the Papacy. This is probably for the better, and IMO a good model of what real integration looks like: I haven't seen any third generation Irish immigrants try to claim victimhood on the basis of Catholicism, which is probably better for society as a whole.
Harlequin5942
15m ago
My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?
It's classic anxiety behaviour. When one is worried about X, but doing something about X seems hopeless, then worry about Y instead, provided Y seems X-ish and it seems like progress on Y is more optimistic. Politicians are under pressure to do something about women being murdered. This is something, and it's "kinda about" women being murdered, or at least violence against women, or at least implied violence against women, or at least violent words about women, or at least nasty words about women. By the supposed transitivity of "aboutness", that's about women being murdered.
jkf
16m ago
IIRC there was a (bad) tempban that may have led her to conclude that the place is beyond hope.
Supah_Schmendrick
18m ago
I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value.
With respect, it's more than just a signal. It's also staking out a coordination point for like-minded people to rally around and to pool efforts/resources. That coordination and massing of support, in turn, unlocks the ability to pressure weakly-allied parties into line, and intimidate enemies.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
27m ago
To understand why "antisemitic" is an issue, you first have to understand that whether a protest is acceptable has little to do with the particular tactics of the protestors. Within a very broad range, protests for acceptable causes are acceptable even if they are disruptive or out-and-out violent, while protests for unacceptable causes are unacceptable if the slightest excuse can be ginned up. The argument over "antisemitism" is an argument over whether these protests are in the first class or the second.
Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire Guma Aguiar, the billionaire Kushners, the billionaire Lev Leviev, the billionaire Ron Perelman, the billionaire Tevfik Arif, the billionaire Israel Englander
Englander is Orthodox and attended yeshiva in Crown Heights growing up. Kaplan donates primarily to zionist causes and tiger conservation charities, I couldn't find much about very large contributions to chareidim but will assume you have done more research here than me. Aguiar was an Evangelical Christian of Jewish descent who became (with his formerly gentile wife) a revert/baal t'shuva to ultra-orthodox Judaism under Tovia Singer, for whom that's a life calling. He then seemed to steal a bunch of money from his uncle, Kaplan, and then used it to fund a rabbi with wacky views about the age of the earth in the hope that he would one day proclaim Aguiar to be the biblical messiah. Personally I don't consider that to be a standard story of secular Jewry funding the ultra-orthodox, but I digress. The Kushners are Orthodox and long have been. Leviev was born an (Orthodox) Bukharan Jew and remains Orthodox. Perelman was born to a conservative family but became Orthodox, writing "as soon as I got married, we kept a kosher house, we became much more observant. We moved to New York shortly thereafter and joined an Orthodox synagogue". Arif is not Jewish at all, though his business partner is.
So not one of the examples you cite (except, possibly, Kaplan with the weird messiah nephew, and I strongly doubt someone that invested in minutiae of the Israeli rabbinate around the issue of the age of the earth isn't religious) is, in fact, a secular Jew.
Stellula
42m ago
I'm honestly getting sick of hearing the word 'antisemitic' as if this is some major moral standard that matters. It is honestly starting to make me...anti-semitic.
I'm a Catholic. If I were to imagine s/anti-semitism/anti-Catholicism/ for all of these things I keep hearing from official government sources, or from the news media (but I repeat myself, hey, oh!) it would just make me laugh. Imagine Karine Jean Pierre starting off her daily press briefing by talking about the "concerning rise of Anti-Catholic sentiment in The United States" or how "Anti Catholicism is never acceptable" or can you imagine the congress passing a law condeming "anti Catholicism" or changing some educational standard to make it so that public schools were required to teach students that Mary was born without original sin?
You know something funny happening in my neighborhood: there is some kind of Jewish center here for students. Since October 7th[1], there has been a police officer posted outside of this building every day, seemingly 24 hours a day. And yet, my house, 2 blocks away, routinely has things stolen from the yard, has had people attempt to break into it, etc. My Church, a few blocks away again from this Jewish student center, has had to put up a large fence, and get our own security to watch over things during mass. What the hell is going on here?
This stuff is ridiculous to me. Yes, don't hate the Jews for being Jewish, but also...you can absolutely criticize anybody for anything; this is America. This is one of our founding ideas.
[1]: I hate having to constantly say this, but October 7th was probably the most horrific thing I have ever seen. Just maximally horrible and brutal. I get why the Israelis want revenge for this. I just don't think I should have anything to do with it, and don't think I should be funding it.
Both are also visibly happier living in the US
Ed Miliband doesn't live in the US, he's still an MP! He will likely be energy minister when Labour wins.
this is consistent with my experience of my school/university social circle where secular Jews who had the opportunity mostly moved to the US.
I would put it differently. Secular American Jews often retain some aspects of their particular ethnic identity because we don't live in a society with as much of a monoculture as the UK. The same was historically true of other groups in the diverse East Coast cities, like the Irish and Italians.
Secular British Jews assimilate very rapidly (even though the overall intermarriage rate is lower because of the higher level of Orthodoxy as you note). Those great Anglo-Jewish families of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Rothschilds, the Goldsmiths and so on, are pretty much entirely gentile now - the younger Rothschilds were raised and baptised in the CofE. Even the 20th century secular Jews of more recent shtetl heritage assimilate quickly - look at how quickly Gerald Ronson's and Philip Green's (who himself married a gentile iirc) children have deserted the faith. And Ronson is a committed Jew! He donates to charities, sat on the board of various things and so on. But even then, it wasn't enough.
There is almost a kind of standard assimilatory narrative for British Jews who make some money. The parents send them to Eton or Harrow or Cheltenham and then Oxbridge, they do well in the city (perhaps in a Jewish firm, perhaps not) or in the arts or something else, then they marry a gentile Sloane Ranger (or a male aristo in the case of the women). In two generations, any residual Jewishness is a family memory, they celebrate Christmas, they have essentially fully assimilated into the British upper-middle or upper class.
The same happened in a different way with working class secular Jews, who largely joined the white exodus out of East London and headed toward Essex. Those who remained religious still exist in large numbers in places like Gants Hill, but many who weren't had within one generation fully assimilated into normal southeastern working class English culture. An example of that is Katie Price's family, or even Stacey Solomon's to some degree. The secular Jewish intellectual culture that exists in the US doesn't exist in Britain. Jews who stay Jewish are overwhelmingly Orthodox, those who don't become English very quickly.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
It's not random. It's a popular phrase being shifted.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1hr ago
Similar topic, I still have absolutely no clue what all the rust drama of some time ago was about. It’s just endless word salad and nobody says openly what the hell is it that they are upset about. It reminds me of when girl factions in the middle school would have public fights overs Facebook and none of the boys would have absolutely no clue what was being fought over
Boarchariot
1hr ago
I went to Montessori school, and then a regular local public school. I don't know if it was that the Montessori style complemented my natural inclinations or formed some of them, but I was always an independent student. Also weird in a variety of ways, and I think my parents gave up on curbing my eccentricities pretty early (and my teachers were all very accepting). I would have been miserable or rebellious if that wasn't the case, I'm sure. But in terms of school and learning I was always interested and curious, and naturally did well (which is what every parent hopes for, but is entirely unhelpful as advice).
I went to the local grade school by foot every day, and came home for lunch for most of my early school years. It felt like school was just an extension of my backyard. That changed in middle school, which was reached by bus. The only extracaricular activity I was ever part of was band in middle school, and the teacher was great. Most of the teachers I had were good, and a handful were very formatice and memorable. My parents did not push any interests on me and supported my interests when they arose.
My mom went to the local high school as a kid and hated it, and it was known for being even rougher by the time I was set to go. I applied to a few different special programs in the area and ended up going to an arts program a bit further away. The extra expenses (bus transport and material fees) were paid by my parents.
It was a regular local high school for some people, and you could see the difference in investment between students who chose to be there versus the students who were local. The teachers were exceptional, but I think students wanting to be there made their jobs easy. I'm confident that I was much happier going to that school than I would have been at the local school. As you can imagine the music, theatre and art kids in highschool were a pretty open minded crowd. I never felt weird or ostracized, and I was able to focus on learning and making friends. The horror stories from other high schools (fights, bullying, drugs) weren't really an issue at mine.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
One of the cringiest faux pas of my lifetime was rating every single female classmate in my 7th grade yearbook. Which was then found and passed around.
There was something deeply distasteful about a mid bro such as myself a) exhibiting how thirsty I was for some of my female friends b) quantitatively showing how unattractive I found others. Even for children this was a bit of a bridge too far, I didn't recover socially from it until 9th grade.
Since then I've migrated to a more progressive, binary system in which women are either a 1 or a 0. There's not as much fidelity but it leads to richer conversations about attractiveness anyway.
It is funny, though, how when it comes to ranking attractiveness women are so vicious and unrealistic compared to men.
I also have a far less charitable reading of "unrapeable" than OP - I think it's obvious that it means someone is too ugly to rape. This is still just dumb kids getting together to say stupid and hateful shit because they have underdeveloped EQ. This has been happening since forever, and it's not a sign of some endemic issue in Australian society. Fuck Marry Kill is a classic game.
2rafa
1hr ago
Consider the 30 year old single mother on a dating app looking for a real man to support her - Judeo-Christian values would say something like 'man up, we're all equal in God, love your neighbour's children as yourself' whereas traditional values would probably scold you for being on Tinder in the first place and exclude the woman from polite society
Traditional morality has no prohibition on marrying a single mother, and indeed encourages it. Mohammed himself (at least according to the Sunnis) married first a woman who had had children by two previous husbands, and married several other widows with many children between them. Remarriage was historically much more common because of widowhood; it's likely that fewer men have a wife with prior children today than at any previous time in history.
Even if we say that the single mother was not widowed and merely divorced, Muhammad and ancient Christians and Jews also married divorced women, and again this was religiously satisfactory in most cases and (in Islam especially) considered an auspicious act for one's chances in the afterlife. Indeed in Judaism, the only man who must marry a virgin is the singular High Priest, and even then only if he marries once in office, rather than before it.
Even if we go one step further and say that our single mother is neither widow nor divorcee but actual whore in the biblical sense, it is unclear how bad this is. Prostitutes being forgiven, even exalted, feature heavily in the New Testament and the Quran and Hadiths. Except for the prohibition for Kohanim, and a line in the Quran about how a 'fornicator' must marry a 'fornicatress' (which if anything is a limit on male promiscuity, but is widely interpreted by scholars as not applying literally for some reason). The only additional Christian prohibition I'm aware of is that if she was married and was divorced for something that was not adultery, she would not be able to remarry.
If you define conservatism as Judeo-Christian values, mass migration, globalization, regime change abroad and so on... then sure, US Jews, British Jews are conservative. George Soros is nearly a conservative, albeit insufficiently supportive of police and dangerously opposed to Israel. If you define conservatism differently, conserving national identity and demographics, conserving national industries, conserving traditional values... then they're absolutely not conservative.
Possibly, but then only a very small percentage of even the native population would be considered 'conservative'. Since there are only two major parties in FPTP systems, the only information we have is about whether some population tends to vote for the more or less leftist one.
RaiderOfALostTusken
1hr ago
I would say I did. I went to public school in Canada in what was considered the sort of "mid-upper class" suburb outside of a more major city. High school had a population of about 400 people, can't really remember what the size of Jr High or Elementary was. I would say that I got along with all of my teachers - there was one teacher who wore her politics on her sleeve and I do remember butting heads against her quite a bit, but there was another one who was a very vocal avowed feminist type but was also really really good, very fond memories. I guess she always kind of had a self deprecating vibe about the whole thing which made it kind of fun.
I would not consider myself as a "popular" kid, but I was definitely "well liked", I could generally be friendly and interact with most if not all of the various cliques without trouble. I do not think that I was ever bullied - despite being by far the shortest person of my age category, I was able to lean into it and have enough confidence that if that was happening, I just didn't register it.
My parents were deeply involved in my schooling, the expectation was 80% minimum grades. If my grades started to slip then it was discussion about what we could do, did I need a tutor? one on one time with the teacher? did I need to remove any extracurriculars? I don't think I would have had the grades I did if they weren't as involved. I also had the opportunity to be in various musical theater productions, including playing the lead in a school musical which played at the local town 500 seat theater, which was a treasured experience I'm glad I got to have.
I think there's an interesting "The Dress" style divide in how this statement is perceived that's basically determined by your belief about whether these boys would rape someone [if they could get away with it]. There's probably a genuine divide between a large number of men who wouldn't and can't conceive that the median man would, and a large number of men who would and can't conceive that the median man sincerely wouldn't, and they are prevented from sizing up each other in part by the circumstance that signalling needs create large sets of those who are in one group but claim to be in the other.
Depending on whether you are a believer that rape is widely accepted (and here the belief about others really seems to matter more than whether you would do it yourself), "unrapeable" sounds either like "I wouldn't take this one for free" (but I would take the others for free - free stuff is good!) or "this wouldn't get stolen if it were left out" (it's not like I'm a thief, but it's so bad that it's beneath even outgroup bad people like thieves).
(I tried and failed to find a realistic instance of something like "the dogs wouldn't eat you if you were thrown to them" being used as an insult, so I have to settle for the weaker point that a hypothetical insult of that type would not be taken as an endorsement of cannibalism.)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
What exactly am I supposed to glean from the rare cases of non-religious Jewish journalists investing Haredi? When I know that billionaire Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire Guma Aguiar, the billionaire Kushners, the billionaire Lev Leviev, the billionaire Ron Perelman, the billionaire Tevfik Arif, the billionaire Israel Englander, and even the Ukrainian former billionaire Kolomoisky, are all either funding ultra orthodox schools and organizations, or have funded them in the past? You wrote “it’s often secular Jews at the forefront of anti-Haredi policies” — no, they are at the forefront of funding them. And a journalistic website is not a “policy”. You are showing me a puddle in the concrete and telling me that it’s the forefront of water in the area, while I look behind you and there’s an expansive ocean with waves crashing against the pier.
Did you mean to write, “some Jews write about things against the ultra orthodox”? Well, sure. You’ve missed the best ones though, like the guy who writes the FailedMessiah blog, or the writer who wrote “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America”. But these guys don’t matter when they are a puddle, and the ocean = secular Jewish billions and literal Mossad.
The aggressive pursuit now is arguably because the largely progressive Jewish donors who funded Bragg's DA campaign care about it a great deal
If you have a source I would be interested in reading it. When NYT “aggressively” wrote a front page piece on ultra orthodox corruption in schools (which was honestly great journalism), nothing actually came from it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
I think your last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter. Attractiveness is tied very tightly to status, particularly for women. When men are ranking women's attractiveness, their rankings are pretty close to openly articulating the status rankings of the women in question - ranking someone last in a group is basically the same thing as just outright saying, "I think she's a loser and not worthy of the same respect as the other women". When this is done with people are members of a near-group (or worse still, a friend-group), it's a fairly aggressive action to take. On the flip side, this is why ranking celebrities can be fun even in a mixed-gender group - no one has to be personally invested in it in the same way. Of course, everyone basically knows where they stand anyway, but it's rude to say it outright! If you had a group of guys where one buddy was unathletic and low-income, everyone in the room would know he's low status, but it's still a dick move to explicitly point it out.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
She's left in the past and come back. Hopefully she comes back again, she is someone I really enjoy hearing from.
SSCReader
1hr ago
Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes.
Again this may be true for very high end employers but for most all they look for is a degree and they don't care how rigorous that degree was. I did recruitment for both private and government organizations, and while the civil service did care, no-one else did, including blue chip communications companies and local government. And the reason for that is they are not getting to pick from Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard grads or wherever in the first place. Your middle of the road office manager type can easily get a job with a non-intellectually rigorous humanities degree. Sure they might not get into Wall Street or quant jobs, but they were never going to. Your point only applies for the very top slice of jobs, for all the others, just need to have a degree to tick a box on the form, you will be fine with a degree in basket weaving or creative writing or musicology.
Armin
1hr ago
If the major objective of a system is to protect the interests of the powerful people that lead the system, then it is logical to say that a feminist society exists to protect the interests of women, and that means protecting them from one of the worst sins, the attack against the faux-equalitarian women's morality system.
It is all longhouse, all way down.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Why is it in bad taste for men to rate women's attractiveness?
It has been my experience that if you show (straight) men a group of women (across anything from a IRL social situation to just a set of headshots), they can pretty reliably sort them quickly by their own metrics of attractiveness. The rankings probably won't be identical, and they could change with interaction, but I bet at any given point most men, even those not looking for partners, are at least aware of who they find the most attractive woman in any given room.
But it's also generally verboten to discuss the rankings themselves in mixed contexts, and even most of the time in male spaces. But I have occasionally been party to discussion of rankings of celebrities. I would be curious of (straight) women think similarly, but I have no real information to go on.
What does "clear" mean here? Reliable? Or subjectively persuasive?
I also think you're probably wrong about the semantics. "Raping Jane is impossible because she's so ugly" doesn't ordinarily imply that "Raping Sally is permissible because she's attractive." That's conflating two different types of modality: moral permissibility and practical possibility.
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