domain:betonit.substack.com
To_Mandalay
9m ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
This feigned incredulity from Scott comes off as quite dishonest:
He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed...Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation... books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here.
Hi, I'm Scott Alexander, I bounce around different Rationalist Group houses, where me and everyone else in my circle forms poly-amorous relationships with with our intellectual collaborators, and spend all their time building up inside jokes, private parties, etc. You see that piece in the New Yorker about the girl who was scared about AI? I was dating her, haha. Stole her from this other guy I used to do collaborate with.
Also Scott Alexander: I guesssss I could see some weirdos who'd want their work to give them to have some banter and flirtation. I don't know if there's a lot of people, but Hannania is entitled to his opinion here, as far out as that seems to you and me.
dr_analog
razorboy
1hr ago
On the other hand, never taking any time for oneself can be somewhat corrosive to one's sanity....
In the last several years I transitioned from being a single hedonist bachelor guy going out every night to hang with friends and go to shows to a married guy with 2 kids + a step kid who works from home and of the time I'd consider "to myself", 99% of it is working out. No drinking, no entertainment media, no friends. I probably socialize once a month at most. And... I actually feel pretty happy and fulfilled and sane?
I'm not sure what to make of this. The satisfying and fulfilling power of family life or something?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
44m ago
Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aids.
Now that's an interesting career choice! How much does it pay?
2rafa
4hr ago
The more you think about something bad that happened to you, the more upset, traumatized and poorly functioning you will be. It is that simple.
Therapy and therapy culture doesn’t work because it dredges up trauma and negative experiences. Repression does work, this is what stuff like ‘playing Tetris after a traumatic event reduces trauma’ does, it represses. Distract yourself, forget about it, and you can have a lifetime of happiness with a few bad occasional recollections.
It is so banal that it is barely worth saying: the less you think about something, the less you stew in it, the less it will affect you.
hydroacetylene
26m ago
Ironically, Afrikaaners would likely be one- the white TFR in South Africa is just below replacement and while I can't find sources that differentiate by ethnic background, at least not in a language I read, the English language ones note Afrikaaners as having larger families than British whites. Dutch Calvinists also have a comfortably above replacement TFR. American republican whites have an overall replacement level fertility rate; this points to subgroups with comfortably above replacement TFR. Mormons are surely one, and southern Evangelicals also have an elevated TFR and are basically an ethnoreligious group at this point. I suspect confessional Lutherans would also qualify. I'm uncertain at the size of the Laestadian movement, because the data is hard to collect and I don't read any of the languages in question, but their fertility rate is very high. Of course, the highest fertility rates in the world are the Pennsylvania Dutch. The Faroes have been above replacement for decades, although low population size.
If you move into eastern Europe, the Byzantine Catholic belt has an elevated fertility rate compared to its neighbors, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in particular looks to have a fertility rate that at least pre-war was on track to reshape Ukraine's demographics. Certain Orthodox groups inside Russia claim a high fertility rate but might be lying. Orthodox Jewry famously has a high fertility rate as well. If you're willing to count southern European descent, a case can be made that Mexican whites are above replacement; Mexico refuses to publicize data on race, but it's knowable from the prevalence of the mongolian spot in Mexican hospital births that whites are increasing as a percentage of the population, and immigration to Mexico(as opposed to away from it) is overwhelmingly from brown countries.
Whites will shrink as a percentage of population basically everywhere in the world except for a few eastern Euro shitholes that no one wants to live in, which will see shrinking populations overall instead. That doesn't mean that white people are in danger of disappearing.
Bartender_Venator
29m ago
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
Generally agree with your post, but this is quite STEMbrained. If you pursue a degree which makes you more interesting and fun to be around, requires developing social skills, and gives you a status hierarchy to climb, you will absolutely have more romantic prospects than if you were just grinding for money. Your future house probably won't be as nice, of course. To take political science as an example, if you're a reasonably-put-together, educated man who can bring himself to tolerate libs, DC is one of the easiest dating scenes in the world, full of attractive women looking for commitment but happy to hook up. The real downside is that these careers and status hierarchies encourage a prolonged adolescence of sleeping with all the easily available women rather than committing to one (and really, everyone ends up losing - if you want to climb a status hierarchy in creative fields, politics, etc., a good woman in your corner will do far more for your success than just the motivation to look good to girls).
On the topic of marriage and kids, I don't notice a particular difference in career paths between the young people I know who are getting married and having kids and those who aren't, except that there seems to be a gulf in fertility and age of marriage between the ones who went to state schools and the ones who went to "elite" colleges.
laxam
3hr ago
'Moving on' is how you deal with trauma and distracting yourself helps with that.
My wife just had an uncle she was close with die suddenly and this is really the first big family death she's experienced. I and her took some time off, she's playing lots of a game she likes, I'm taking her out to eat. She's still dealing with moments of intense sadness but, in general, is dealing with it really well, essentially entirely because I'm not letting her dwell on it.
I've had an inordinate number of deaths in my family, starting from pretty young, and the hard truth is that you never really 'get over it' but you absolutely move on. I still have moments of sadness to do with my mother's death decades ago but they're few and far between and it otherwise doesn't effect my life. Picking up and keeping going is how to deal with hard spots in your life. Real mental illness is different but, to be honest, most people going to therapists don't have real mental illnesses.
incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture
That is hopelessly confounded. For most of history, the only treatment for mental illnesses was beatings, blood letting, the asylum, or maybe some mercury if it was syphilitic.
They barely had the conceptual framework to understand mental illness in the first place.
Besides, we know that the stressors of modernity are bad for mental health in of themselves, just look at social media and dating apps for recent examples. Atomization of families, loss of the (false) comfort from religion and so on.
Not everything is a mass psychogenic illness. I would bet a great deal of money that things like depression, BPD, bipolar disorder and the like aren't. And therapy helps, at least when we now recognize and formally diagnose those who could need it.
My own ADHD would certainly have gone undiagnosed, as would so many other conditions (not that therapy does anything there, the drugs help).
therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well
I feel like my citations speak for themselves here. Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete? I'd be curious to hear how that's not the case.
I'm not defending therapy culture. It's infantilizing to say the least. But actual therapy works well enough that we often consider it the firstline treatment before resorting to the funny drugs. And that's a considered decision made by multiple independent bodies, on the basis of a great deal of evidence.
Spookykou
2hr ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
Spookykou
52m ago
That is hopelessly confounded.
It is certainly confounded enough that I did not mean to imply that I have some sort of formula that accurately describes the relationship, but are you contesting that the relationship exists at all, or do you think it is not big enough to meaningful inform how we think about the efficacy of therapy? My thought process here, in simple terms, would be that a person who is having a shitty time but does not exist in therapy culture, has a less shitty time than the same person in therapy culture. So, a study that finds that people who show up with depression get better after therapy, has the problem for me, that I do not know if that person would have had an equally bad condition in the counterfactual where they don't know what depression is. Imagine if the anorexia in South Korea story is correct, and previously Korean girls never got anorexia, and now a bunch are getting it. Someone coming along and telling me that therapy does better than a placebo at treating their anorexia with super high-powered top-tier most excellent and well replicated research, is still not offering me a particularly compelling defense, if I think therapy awareness campaigns 'caused' the anorexia in the first place. See also all the stories of, trauma counseling that traumatized someone.
I'm not trying to say that the myriad forms of mental illness have no basis in real human experiences and emotional states. I just think it's possible that therapy, and the (unavoidable?) downstream therapy culture, might actually be a bad way to structure a societal understanding and response to those feelings.
Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete?
Maybe? It isn't easy for me to evaluate the counterfactual. I have no idea exactly how destructive a, the way to deal with bad emotions is to go a little wild and break stuff, society needs to be, the purge is (probably) too far, the way I dealt with stress as a kid (running around yelling), probably healthier than what we do now.
WhiningCoil
2hr ago
Let me make my argument absolutely clear then.
The failure of the government to ban some subset of unhealthy foods does not prevent the government from banning other unhealthy foods. The fact that the government has failed to ban trans fats, refined sugar, etc, etc, etc is not an argument that the government should not ban lab grown meat. Making that argument is taking a government that sucks, and claiming it needs to suck more. It's claiming that because the government has done the wrong thing before, it's not allowed to do the right thing now. That's a silly argument.
Bad Therapy is largely about that kind of thing. The premise is that there are always risks to any intervention, and when the target audience isn't suffering from debilitating mental illness, the risks outweigh the benefits.
My father experienced something similar with his sister, due to a "repressed memories" therapist.
The identity preference ratchet is something else, though, from what I've heard. Something more like Marxist class warfare, but for identity groups. Cain and Able, Kulaks, misdirected Leviathan, that kind of thing.
There might sometimes be a steel man for people to use HR scary words about discrimination and toxic environments when they really just have kind of a shitty manager who's bad at managing or something. As far as I can tell, unless it's absurdly obvious and well documented, if an employee complains that their manager is bad at their managing job, they will be met with disinterest, possibly irritation towards them, rather than the manager. Perhaps they will get in trouble for wanting clear directives or trying to enforce their own boundaries in the face of the shitty manager at some point. They will probably not get a better manager. If they go on about HR scare words, on the other hand, the company will go out of its way to protect them from reprisal, and they might actually get put under someone else. That's a win for the employee! So that's what they're incentivized to do.
Therapyspeak is the language of the Anarchist. It is the language of those who do not believe in discipline and self control, who want to erase the line between good and evil.
Some of the terms I've heard quite a bit in the past 5 years that I highly distrust:
"Toxic". People and relationships are declared to be toxic, and it is understood that bad actions can then be taken against them. There is no standard for what makes something toxic. Rhetoric using this term often recommends the user to end relationships, and it generally does not look like sound wise advice. Using this term is a request for power and authority, rather than an assertion of meaning.
"Self Care". This is a synonym for self-indulgence, but with a good connotation instead of a bad one. Spending 8 hours watching netflix for example, in my grandfather's English, would be understood to be a moderately shameful act of vice. Now it can be referred to as "Self Care", in which case it is understood as a noble recognition of ones own weakness.
"Triggered". This word is used to blame others for ones own mental outbursts. A man who has internalized a value system of discipline and personal responsibility would never use such a word, but a member of the CPUSA would never question one who did.
"Codependency". Means nothing more than "relationship", but again, it goes from having what is, according to my values, a correct positive connotation, to having an incorrect negative connotation.
There are values which lead to a good stable society. These values were baked into the our culture, into our stories, into our language itself. Most respectable men have internalized these values- its quite hard to achieve anything in life without doing so.
When people use therapyspeak, they are signaling their opposition to these values. They may truly oppose them, or they may want to signify membership in the group of people who oppose them. But if you are still committed to those values, for whatever reason, you may find such speech uncomfortable.
One thing I have no explanation for, is why all of these terms seem to have originated in therapy. I cannot think of any other recently popularized terms like this- terms designed to assault traditional European values and signal membership in the revolution- which did not originate in therapy.
Gaashk
1hr ago
Yeah.
Also, in my circles "self care" has mostly been co-opted by non-self actors to try to get people to do what they want them to. People do not take a personal day off of work for "self care," but rather to do a thing that they like. The people talking about self care in those words are the ones running restorative justice circles, pastors talking about "prayer and fasting as self care," an employer pushing "we all need to practice self care! Call this number for a free telephone therapy session" (presumably as an alternative to taking a half day off to see a real therapist, or asking for better working conditions). Now when I hear it I think the speaker is trying to get me to replace my actual preferences with something they consider better or more virtuous.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Historically? They worked, and the people who studied torah all day were a minority like Catholic priests or nuns. But once you could get paid to do torah studies, an obvious incentive structure developed.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 For more information please reread this post
4hr ago
"Self Care". This is a synonym for self-indulgence, but with a good connotation instead of a bad one. Spending 8 hours watching netflix for example, in my grandfather's English, would be understood to be a moderately shameful act of vice. Now it can be referred to as "Self Care", in which case it is understood as a noble recognition of ones own weakness.
On the other hand, never taking any time for oneself can be somewhat corrosive to one's sanity....
I think this might be an instance of All Debates Are Bravery Debates.
Tanista
3hr ago
an embarrassment that is disliked by its own peers, but still to be defended from outsiders
DeBoer has outright stated that, in his ideal world, "the wokest person you know" get 90% of what they want. Combine that with his strident attitude towards gender topics (where his anti-idpol takes give way to annoyance that anyone has an idpol skeptical take)...
So yes.
stav
17hr ago
Is therapy and therapy speak actually harmful to people that have mental illness? As a programmer, I have ended up in multiple projects with people that have BPD or bipolar disorder because it seems to attract these kinds of people.
The first time I noticed this was when I was in college and a good friend of mine who is bipolar asked me to be his partner on a final project together for an operating systems class to use Markov chains for predictive paging. We had it almost done and I had generated a bunch of data to use and my algorithm was slightly off. He took the data and code I sent him that I hadn't yet submitted to our GitHub and took it as his own and just submitted it so it looked like I didn't do anything. When I confronted him about it, he started using a bunch of therapy speak like I understand you think this is what happened etc. and all this other bullshit that he learned from therapists. The thing was that it obviously wasn't true what he was saying but he had all these tools from a therapist to disregard me being annoyed about what actually happened (and I had literal proof). It turned out he had taken a bunch of adderal that made him borderline insane and used that therapy speak to deny reality. He eventually apologized to me and just said he was stressed and took too much adderal and it made him insane for a few weeks before he graduated. This is not the first time I have seen this.
I have also seen this in my family where my grandpa sexually molested his daughter (my dad's sister). When my grandpa died, she started accusing my dad of bizarre stuff like sniffing and stealing her panties. The thing is, this is literally impossible because my dad is 10 years younger than her so he would have been a toddler when this sexual molestation she claimed my dad did happened. Plus she was in college and away for some of this stuff that she claimed happened. Yet her therapist encouraged her to accuse my dad of this publicly and ruin his reputation in our family. Other than her kids, everyone realized it was literally impossible, but half of our family don't talk now because a therapist encouraged her to make insane claims. I'm not some right wing extremist saying don't believe women, but the idea that a 5 year old was sexually harassing a 15 year old is literally insane. Yet she found a therapist that told her this is true. This clearly isn't a scientific field.
I currently work at a big company that is woke as hell (possibly top 10% woke) and because I am an executive director and have admin privileges, I get involved in similar disputes with our legal and HR team. I don't read these people's emails and chats, but from talking to our HR and legal team when I have to pull this data there are so many insane people making these claims of sexual harassment or bigotry.
The funniest part is despite how absurdly woke this company is and all the identity politics groups we have, almost none of them claim the company is discriminating against them. My executive admin is a young Black woman who runs the Black company group. From what I have seen, they don't claim that the company is necessarily racist but instead they advocate expanding our recruitment to things like HBCUs or removing degree requirements for jobs. I'm sure they deep down want quotas and they massively get supported by management, but I haven't seen any explicit calls for this.
This brings me back to therapy speak. All these people that have sued our company for "discrimination" have used bullshit therapy speak to justify their insane claims. This company bends over backwards to hire blacks and hispanics (and by the way, there are a lot of hispanics in the company regardless they don't need affirmative action) and anything claimed otherwise is nonsense. Therapy speak justifies people who are bad at their job and allows them to think they are victims. And all the woke women and blacks in HR have agreed with this! Bottom line, a lot of people are being enabled by therapists to be toxic and blame whites or patriarchy instead of their own behavior, and even the woke HR people agree with this. Sorry for the rant.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
6hr ago
I'm pretty sure you're the guy who's ban evaded ten times.
It can't be, he's assured us that he has little sympathy for the far right (before launching into four paragraphs of standard far right talking points).
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
7hr ago
Yeah. Google, several times, tried to recruit heavily from HBCUs and when that didn't work tried to improve the educational program (the CS program, anyway) at HBCUs so it would work. There was resistance from some of the people at the HBCUs of course, but I doubt that was the only problem. The top HBCUs just have a lower quality of student (e.g. as measured by standardized test scores) than median state flagships.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
It seems pretty clear that the actually mentally ill benefit from therapy.
It seems much more clear that most people who are in therapy do not, in fact, need to be there. Is therapy actually harmful for people who don't need it? That's a much more interesting and better supported question, and I think you're actually describing that. I'm someone who's benefited from therapy; I think I benefited more from religion(which is also much cheaper) but that therapy definitely helped and didn't lead me to make insane claims. But most people in therapy should just make friends instead, and there's lots of anecdata indicating that therapy hurts them in ways beyond just costing money.
Baby steps. Get people over the hangup of "it's not ok to just ban things, only leftists are allowed to do that!", then work on "woah you can't just throw communists into an alligator swamp, thats only ok when communists do it!"
If they can ban dishwashers that actually wash dishes and then raid people who import ones that work, we can do the same to them. And anyone who complains needs to be reeducated.
I recently heard of yaslighting, which is where instead of convincing someone their true beliefs are delusional, you affirm their delusional beliefs and convince them they're true.
Seems to apply to a lot of things (especially transgenderism) but what I have in mind is college degree choice. Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.
I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter. If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.
My mother is one of these women. The way she describes it, she finished her Psychology bachelors and only then realized it would take another couple years to make a career out of it. She's extremely smart, conscientious, and logical. I can't imagine her as someone who would just forget to look into these things. During that time she married a man who would go on to become very successful, and I think that (marrying a good man, that is, not necessarily a rich one) must have been the ultimate goal all along, whatever she told herself in the process.
I'm starting to see a similar phenomenon among my siblings. My brothers have laid out step-by-step plans for college and their eventual careers. My sister just wants to study Psychology because it's interesting. None of them would breathe a word about the different expectations between the genders--the topic is somewhat taboo--but they nevertheless have Gotten the Message and are all pursuing seemingly effective strategies optimized for their gender.
My wife and I have broached the subject of Psychology careers a couple of times with my sister, and she seems actively disinterested in thinking it through. I expect she, like my mother, will get married sometime during or just after her Bachelor's degree, and claim she was unaware she needed a Master's to turn the major into a career.
This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions. The problem arises when someone doesn't get the message and thinks the social reality is the reality, that men can "study what you enjoy" for 4 years in college with no lasting impact to career prospects or marriagability, or that women can do the same without searching for husbands and things will work out for them.
My wife is a teacher. Most of her coworkers fall into these categories. Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aids. Others (the school's speech pathologists, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, etc.) are women who didn't end up getting married during their Bachelor's, and now are working very slowly towards Master's degrees while working.
American culture gets a lot of things wrong, but imo nothing so badly as gender roles. We encourage women to overeducate, in the process aging themselves out of the possibility of having children, and depriving the next generation of those who could have been their smartest and most capable mothers. It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
Telling women to not look for husbands in college, and focus on education, is similar, though its results manifest in different ways. Such women will (as they get more educated) grow increasingly unable to find comparably "impressive" partners. Many will remain single, sleeping around but never committing, while a few will "settle" many years down the road. Neither situation is great for raising a family.
Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.
American tfr fell to 1.62 in 2023, its lowest rate ever, and is even lower among our most intelligent and conscientious. Financial incentives meant to correct this in places like Finland and Turkey have accomplished very little overall. The problem is not financial, it is cultural and legal. People need to think of advice like "study your hobby and things will work out" as a malicious lie meant to signal a luxury belief. Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career. Couples need to be allowed to mutually agree to contracts incentivizing them to stick together.
The truth is and always has been the truth, but more people need to be made more consciously aware of it. If women want large families, they need to start before finishing their Master's. I burned a lot of credibility with my immediate family getting married as young as I did, and sacrificing my social life and physical health to be financially ready for children quickly. This was the right decision, but it pains me to say I probably won't be able to convince them to do the same until after the crucial window has passed. I hope to convince you, though, or if you are already convinced, to offer you some ammunition convincing those you care about.
For the vast majority of people, the quality and quantity of their children will have far more of an effect on the future than anything else they could do. If you like being alive, and/or find it meaningful, it is likely your kids will too, and bringing them into the world to experience the joy of existence is an enormous gift you have the power to offer them. Less important, but still significant, 71% of Americans are happy with their decision to have children, or wish they had more, while only 10% wish they had less.
Whether for selfish or selfless reasons, having children early is the right call for most people, but our culture has conducted an enormous yaslighting campaign to prevent this from happening until it's too late.
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