domain:streamable.com
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
The mistake is thinking that there is any systematic "solution" that will avoid people sometimes being callow, manipulative, unempathetic, or simply mistaken in ways that result in broken hearts and worse.
I agree with the author that actually interacting with, and making informed decisions about, the individual people in front of you, is the most important thing - you can't rely on any ideology or heuristic to do the thinking for you. But I disagree because there is also a value to "purity" - having sex is a really major step in a relationship, and can really skew people's attitudes towards each other, and towards relationships in general.
Whether to have sex, and who to have sex with, really is an important decision with outsize importance - particularly for heterosexual women - and should be approached really, really carefully, given the young and immature ages at which young women become sexually attractive to men, and the drastically-different attitudes most men and most women have towards sex (see, e.g., the sexual habits of gay men vs. lesbian women).
Supah_Schmendrick
2hr ago
It's not a terribly deep or positive thought, but I kinda yawned my way through this.
It's not that it's badly written, but more that it's formulaic. Ah yep - conservative religious upbringing that fails to actually describe recognizable relations between the sexes and settles for formulaic denunciations. Escapist fantasies of liberation that inevitably shatter on the weird, cold, and uncomfortable reefs of confusing interpersonal relations? Check. And next we'll have...yup, there it is...sublimation of the disappointment from those broken dreams into uncharitable takes on the opposite sex, complete with meme-tier statistics. Finally, we wrap up with white-knuckled clinging to any available validation for the hole the author's dug herself, a wistful call-back to liberatory fantasies, and a circle back to those conservative parents, who still remain fuddy-duddies.
And as a parthian shot, I have a hard time taking the author's complaints about the sexual marketplace seriously when she's literally an OnlyFans model. Bemoaning the lack of human connection in romantic matters and the reduction of women to "defective cumrags" rings mighty hollow from that position.
On the other hand, make that bag I guess.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
2hr ago
I found it remarkable that she fully offloaded any responsibility from women for the status quo. They are all being forced to have all this sex with strangers by the men and the media and have zero accountability themselves.
Little by little she comes to agree with what her mother taught her. Her onlyfans career is perhaps best viewed as a way to continue her rebellion without a cause.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1hr ago
I think the only solution to sexual morals is purity culture enforced and maintained with equal passion for both sexes -- actually, even stronger for men, as has been understood in Christendom for a very long time.
This isn't in the culture war thread. So I'll try to be restrained in my views here. But I see the author's post as a distinct demonstration of the utter failure mode of Islam, that it does not teach sexual purity to both sexes but hammers home the impurity of sex for women while maintaining the significance of having many sexual partners for men.
What Christian purity culture done right does, what it's always done, is insist that both sexes are placed with the burden of avoiding sexual sin and seeking righteousness. And this is not a purity that is eternally lost, but something that can be regained through repentance and a change of heart. The Christian tradition is full of sexual sinners of all kinds who made the active choice to change their behavior and are celebrated as just as holy -- maybe even more, in some ways! -- as the saints who never struggled with such sins. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." (Heb 12:11)
I also resent the repeated insistence that Western sexual mores are in any way equivalent to the ones from her background. The "husband stitch" is equivalent to full-on removal of the clitoris? Really? I'm open to this being a bad practice, but in any case I don't see this as equivalent to FGM, just as, while opposing it, I don't see male circumcision as equivalent to FGM.
I'd also note that the purity-based murder in London she recounts, from 2002, was not a native English father, but a Kurdish man, according to her own citation, weakening her view that this is a pervasive problem in the West because of Western values:
In 2002, 16-year-old Heshu Jones, from the Kurdish community of West London, was murdered by her father after allegedly failing a virginity test. Her father slit her throat and then jumped off a balcony in an attempt to kill himself.
My stance on this issue is somewhere between her and her mother. I think she's right that the double standard for men and women, the teaching that God is "the type that’s supposedly the arbiter of justice, yet puts its thumb on the scale for women," is bad. I also don't believe in that God. Instead I believe in the God who teaches that "no fornicator or impure man, or one who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance." (Eph. 5:5) May the fuckboys live in as much shame as the sluts -- perhaps more.
I agree with the author that there are many cases in which women choose to have sex when they'd probably be better off making a different choice. That's baked into the pie of my fair-minded views on sexual mores, and is the same for men. But I also think this particular person may be doing that thing where people project their own understanding of their sexuality onto other people, and then recoil in horror with an inability to understand how other people's legitimate sexual desires differ.
While I'm not the biggest fan of BDSM's existence in the world, I think she, like many radfems, has utterly no understanding of the actual and real women out there who legitimately and in the deep recesses of her desire want some sort of kinky sex life. I have known women like this. Fifty Shades of Gray did not become a best seller because of the patriarchy.
As with all radical feminists, I'm not sure she's the best person in the world to make a full determination as to the state of play re: women's sexuality. I believe she still has a lot of her mother in her, though she doesn't realize it. In her feminism, I think she may have become a raging sexist, denying equal agency and humanity to women. In pinning blame for all of the sexual revolution's failures on men, she ignores the actual reality that many women do want sex, even promiscuous sex, even kinky sex, and in that way falls deeply into her childhood beliefs that "it's different for boys."
jeroboam
2hr ago
Sorry, but this is annoying.
I said Trump is not vindictive. Then someone replied with "give an example of magnanimity". Of course, magnanimity is not the same as not vindictive. Ignoring this contradiction, I replied with an example of how he is not vindictive.
Now you are trying to force me to defend a claim I never made, that Trump is magnanimous? I never said that.
gattsuru
12m ago
I'd caution that the NRA and its members are technically the 'victim' in the current New York lawsuit, but that didn't stop James from threatening the entire organization's mandate, digging through and almost-certainly leaking a ton of internal records, and pretty much crippling both the legal and political expenditures for one election already and probably a second. Tots coincidentally, no insurance provider in the state is willing to work with the organization, a ton of competent personnel have fled the ship or started planning competitors with all the inefficiencies and lost time that demands, so on. We won't know the full reckoning for a bit (June?), but the possibility that the org ends up under a hostile state's conservatorship is absolutely still in the cards.
Tides doesn't face that threat, but it's not because the state can't fuck over a badly operated donor funnel; it's because Republicans don't have the infrastructure to make that push.
Um actually black samurai were totally a thing historically. But even if they weren't, why does it matter and why are you so bothered about an ahistoric depiction of a black man pairing up with a young Japanese woman to kill a bunch of Japanese men? It's only a video game.
its_all_so_tiresome.jpg
On the bright side, this should be a boom for jokes and memes beyond the obligatory "dass rite, we wuz samuraiz n shieett."
For example, the top appearing comment on the YouTube trailer says "The most heroic thing about this trailer is that they left the comments open." Another commenter remarks, "I cannot wait for Ubisoft to make an assassin's creed game set in Africa and make the main character a Chinese man." Assassin's Creed: Empire of Dust does indeed have some gravitas as a title. There are a bunch of Japanese comments and I'd like to imagine they're chudding out hardcore, but haven't plugged them into a translator lest my illusions get shattered.
Looking at Wikipedia, apparently there are something like 25 Assassin's Creed titles between the main and spinoff series? I would have guessed there were like five.
Tomato
1hr ago
The premise that “24 year old female virgin” is a rare specimen is in itself pretty interesting.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2hr ago
Reading femcel accounts/anecdotes are always.... Grating. I hate it.
Did the women in the story suffer? Yes. Is this a suboptimal scenario for most women were the modal experience is getting pumped and dumped? Yes.
It's grating because men are always painted as evil in these articles and it's only the 5% of men they interact with off of the apps being talked about.. No shit lady, what were you expecting?
Seriously? What even is the solution for women here? Expecting agency from them is a non starter, most men applying their agency won't work in this app mediated world, seems to be a coup complete problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
When you are weak it is best to avoid antagonizing your enemy.
Granting for the sake of discussion that Reds are "weak", it seems to me that all Red Tribe victories in living memory have come from actions generally characterized as antagonistic, and no valuable victories have ever been delivered through actions generally characterized as cooperative or conciliatory. Further, given the state of the culture war, it's hard to imagine how this could possibly be otherwise. Many, many Blue Tribe actions, especially in the last decade, seem to me to be strongly antagonistic to the point where a response is fundamentally necessary to retain even a modicum of legitimacy for the existing system.
The worst case scenario is that the bureacracy would just say "no" to Trump's orders, precipitating a constitutional crisis.
What's driving your definition of "worst case", here? Worst case relative to what?
I believe the current system has been engineered by Blues to be incapable of providing redress for Red grievances. It doesn't matter what elections we win, what laws we pass, what norms we follow, what processes we engage with, the output is always failure for our goals and values and victory for those of Blues. If that is the situation, then how would precipitating a constitutional crisis make things "worse"? We've already seen the normalization of organized political violence nationwide, universal violations of fundamental human rights, the partisan weaponization of the security services, and the complete collapse of rule of law. What would a constitutional crisis add to those problems?
I am perfectly willing to see Trump die in jail. Trump is by no means irreplicable, and his value as a martyr could easily exceed his value as a President. It seems obviously worse to me to see the numerous catastrophic abuses committed by Blue Tribe be cemented into durable norms, as was done with their abuses in previous generations. Playing nice for fear of the consequences of conflict is exactly how we arrived in our current predicament. It is past time to fight fire with fire.
Forgotpassword
28m ago
I think that's understated. I recently went on an anthropological expedition by way of mass online dating. I had about 80 first dates over the course of 2022. I was mostly looking for upper-middle, educated, career-having women and I'd say about a quarter were palpably inexperienced to the point that I don't think they had any meaningful romantic experience by their mid-late twenties.
Like this wasn't coy 'oh teehee I'm a virgin, bats eyelids', this was like... obvious unfamiliarity with how dating even 'worked'. The common theme generally being some form of coming from a fairly repressive sub culture, focusing hard on education/career until finally getting to 26-27 and their parents' reproach shifted from 'When are you becoming a doctor' to 'When am I becoming a grandparent'. Then they'd sally out onto Hinge with a vague dream of meeting somebody nice, and no real experience beyond consuming KDramas.
crushedoranges
29m ago
Mostly, inserting an anti-colonial spin which is anachronistic. The mutation of the traditional Japanese beauty into the feminist heroine role, which is annoying but must be accepted in everything remotely mainstream nowadays.
gattsuru
32m ago
In some ways, that difference can make it a better metaphor, especially for conversations in the 1990s and early-00s. Questions like whether you can treat sexual minorities with additional caution because of an infectious disease (or even protect them from themselves, as defenders of the Cuban concentration camps sanatorios argue even today), or ethnicities with suspicion because a co-religionist drove a plane into a building are still relevant, even if they're not the central case. Rogue killing someone with a casual touch, or Cyclops blowing up a city block with a blink, are exaggerations, but there are answers to these questions that also answer all the closer ones.
I'm a fan of bringing up trans stuff and gun stuff... well, partly because it makes both sides very uncomfortable, but also because the question of whether a dick gun makes a rapist murderer drives a lot of disagreement. Not all, especially outside of the TERF border, but a decent amount. And one reasonable response is that ability alone does not make for a deadly act: it takes either decision or negligence.
It's just that this ended up not being where the broader progressive movement actually went. There had always been a fraction insistent that prejudgement was fine for even things far smaller than leveling an skyscraper, it was just being pointed the wrong direction, and they won. Once you've decided that the possibility was enough, you're pretty quickly going to find yourself just haggling over the price. At the risk of pointing to metafictional example:
Huntington's disease was a hereditary degenerative disease with cognitive and psychiatric symptoms, one of which was psychosis. Huntington's was seen in perhaps one in eight thousand people, and psychosis was seen in perhaps one in ten of those. If a randomly selected human of Superman's apparent age were to obtain Superman's pwoers, there would be in a one in eight thousand chance that they would both have Huntington's disease and the symptoms of psychosis, the result of which would probably be casualties that would dwarf the Great War by a large margin...
When these probabilities were multiplied together, the final very rough estimate was that Superman had a one in ten chance of bringing about a global scale human catastrophe of some kind in the next thirty years. Even if the odds had been one in a hundred, Lex would have taken a similarly extreme course of action.
Dean
1hr ago
I don't think so?
I'm as much to slag on Odyssey as anyone for basically ignoring fem!MC's gender when it should have mattered in a notoriously sexist society, but AC has consistently to this point picked representatives from the culture of the setting as the primary MCs, and to varying degrees used their identity as part of the culture as a significant part of the storytelling. The Italian Renaissance wouldn't have worked as well without an Italian straight out of a noble revenge story, American Revolution utilized it's half-native-american quite deliberately to illustrate that the revolutionaries were the heroes of not necessarily everyone's story, gangster London is a class struggle of the undercrust. Odyssey is blatantly a Greek heroic epic by and of a greek, right down to the notorious fighting of family.
None of these would have worked nearly as well were the character a cultural outsider, as the protagonists aren't simply protagonists of their game, but of the culture rising above the socio-political moment the stories take place in. The Italian Assassin subverting the Church in the Renaissance is also the Italian culture taking that step towards subverting its dogmatic influence through reason and, well, the enlightenment. It's an Italian cultural victory, through an Italian cultural representative, in an Italian manner.
Yasuke the black samurai/ninja isn't going to be the most Japanese protagonist of one of the most culturally salient periods of Japanese identity, particularly when the reason for choosing him derives from American, not Japanese, identity politics.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
There were lots of specific allegations in 2020, and most of the cases weren't heard for lack of standing. To the extent that there have been follow-up investigations, much of the relevant evidence no longer exists. Chain-of-custody is gone.
I guess I'm trying to say, without opening up the whole 2020 debate all over again, that everyone in the world agreed that 2020 was stolen, it would be extremely difficult to name specific actors. We could prove that 3k ballots from Fulton County were fraudulent, but who created them? Unless somebody came forward there would have to be an investigation first.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11hr ago
...assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple.
Ah, yes, the old pretending to be retarded style of counterargument. I notice this often enough that I started bookmarking examples that I meant to get around to writing up, but it still surprises me when I bump into examples of people that appear to just obviously putting on a show of acting like they're confused about something that's simple and obvious to anyone involved. No one is objecting to Assassin's Creed being fantastical and taking a bunch of poetic license with the source material and content from history. I've played exactly one Assassin's Creed game and included the cinematically awesome leap of faith mechanic - your character, dressed in aesthetic white robes, can climb to incredibly high perches above cities and dive off, covering tons of terrain in a majestic swan-dive before plopping safely into a stack of hay. Helpfully, some physics students ran some quick math on this and concluded that diving a couple hundred feet into a shallow bed of straw will probably kill you.
Of course, this didn't really bother anyone even though there probably weren't very many Arab assassins diving off of mosques into shallow beds of straw. Why not? Because it's awesome. It looks cool, it's a fun mechanic, and it's memorable. People weren't bothered by Ben Franklin having a magical golden apple because it just sounds incredibly fun in the context of America's founding. You know what else is fun and awesome? Samurai and ninja assassins in medieval Japan. Super awesome and super cool, something that much pretty much every male grows up thinking is super awesome and super cool. So, naturally, fans of the game are excited to play out one of the classic settings for awesome sword-play.
You know what's not awesome? Injecting your stupid racial politics into 16th century Japan and then hiding behind "actually, there was a black samurai, and you weren't even upset about a golden apple, so I've gotcha you racist". Furthermore, when someone does that, you can probably rest assured that they're not all that invested in making the game awesome, so it raises your hackles in expectation that you're dealing with people that are more interested in pissing off putative racists than actually making a game cool. Maybe the game will be good and maybe it won't, but pretending to be retarded when having the argument isn't likely to convince anyone.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Project 2025 has approximately zero chance of succeeding:
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The president is already allowed to appoint approximately 4,000 people to high-level agency positions. At any given time in the Trump Administration, approximately 1200, or about a third, were unfilled. If he can't manage to fill these it's unlikely he's going to fill anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand additional posts.
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He's already notoriously bad at picking aides who are loyal to him. He fought with his own cabinet more than any president in recent memory. There's no reason to believe that four years of not having to appoint anyone is somehow going to make him better at this role. This problem is magnified by the fact that most of these positions aren't going to be under his direct supervision, and he'll only know that they don't have the requisite loyalty when a scandal erupts. Not a good look.
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If you remove a career bureaucrat and replace him with a political hack, the new guy isn't likely to have an in-depth understanding on how things actually work. Bureaucrat A doesn't do what you want so you replace him with Bureaucrat B. Bureaucrat B is dedicated to doing what you ask, except he isn't well-versed in the Administrative Procedure Act or the various other laws governing the office, and he's essentially starting from scratch. Except there's no time to get up to speed because the president wants this done now, so he ends up doing something that violates the law and the action ends up getting tied up in court for the next six months while the new guy in charge bungles various other duties of the office that were an afterthought under the first guy. Now the president's in the position where he has to fire Bureaucrat B and replace him with another guy who didn't make the cut the last time and is now even more likely to screw things up. Meanwhile guys appointed to non-contentious positions are making their own little messes that just become fodder for your opponents without any political gain. This obviously isn't going to happen every time, but when you're talking about thousands of positions the Venn diagram isn't always going to match up and there's a good chance you find you've appointed a moron.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
This poor gal is mentally ill.
Okay. Now you just need to convince women collectively that sex-positive Feminism works fine, actually, and their ocean of complaints and concerns should be discarded. That they shouldn't actually feel like shit when they get pumped and dumped, that the shame and humiliation are all in their heads and sex really is just an idle amusement with zero deep connection to human psychology that should have no consequences ever.
I haven't done more than skimming the article, but she seems to be laying out how she rejected her religious upbringing and went all-in on sex-positivism, and yet still found that sex-positivism didn't actually deliver on its promises. And your argument is... what? That she should have just gone ahead and fucked and everything would have been fine? What about the women who did fuck, and regret it?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14m ago
Can you explain what that means, and what your justification for that claim is?
Onystri
14m ago
Seconding Mother of Learning, it's truly is a rare gem from RoyalRoad AND it's still available fully on the website, despite the books on kindle. After looking through tens of works on RR that don't seem to have any hint of coherent ending around this decade I bought the books just as a "thank you" for the author. One curious "error" from writing continuously is still present though -
Otherwise a lot of works on RR starts to blend together with each other in my mind, oh berserking skill + healing, daring aren't we?
Lost_Geometer
17m ago
There is a motte and bailey between real past and possible future vote fraud. A common reading of "Go after voter fraud" would be that such fraud actually is happening in sufficient quantity to merit pursuit.
Supah_Schmendrick
18m ago
once there is literally no space free from the towering presence of a trans stasi agent.
This, even in extremely-progressive (thus trans-friendly) spaces, is incredibly, ridiculously overstated.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20m ago
I can't help but see such "inclusion" as actually being rather alienating to women
I recall some of the dehumanizing language they used for women:
https://www.jostrust.org.uk/professionals/health-professionals/nurse-gp/trans-non-binary/language
Bonus hole – An alternative word for the vagina preferred by some trans men and/or non-binary people with a cervix. It is important to check which words someone would prefer to use.
There's also 'birthing persons' for to denote what would otherwise (problematically) be called real women.
Inclusion can mean throwing these novel terms at people, getting everyone to announce their pronouns even though there aren't any trans people there. Creating new words puts people on the back foot, amateurs/students who don't know the technical jargon. It gets people to low-level signal their conformity and acceptance of the party line, mostly out of not wanting to be rude.
sliders1234
1hr ago
I think in large parts of society and in the educated class at this time sexual purity is outside the Overton window. Saying no isn’t possible without being weird and undatable.
It doesn't matter what you get them for as long as you confiscate their money and give it to regime-supporting organizations through Consent Decrees, like Obama did. The famous "120 mil to the govt or 40 mil to La Raza" option.
Fine them 60 billion for not having enough signage on their disabled parking spaces, whatever you can pin on them. Tesla had to pay a hundred mil because a black guy said "nigga" without being fired, bet we can find plenty of hostile workplace materiel in "literally slaughter colonizers and their children" if we really try.
Of course the real golden ticket is finding that the tides foundation is conspiring to fund criminal activity and launder money from that activity.
Which starts by getting sentences on street level antifa groups and working up until you can get all their lawyers disbarred.
Even setting this as a goal counts as a win when Conservatism spent years trying to "win debates" in a bow tie.
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