domain:alexberenson.substack.com
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Isn’t there a group 4 who just finds it creepy as her was dystopian? Then there is group five who call a certain terrorist-cum-philosopher Uncle Ted.
nomenym
32m ago
In practice, "inclusion" means conformity to the ideology. For example, the mere presence of a conservative expressing non-progressive opinions will make a space non-inclusive. All kinds of diversity are welcome except that diversity which is non-inclusive, and so that actually means a rather narrow range of diversity limited to "historically marginalized groups" of race, gender, and sexuality.
2D3D
1hr ago
There are excessively few high quality women having kids in the west even controlling for earlier sexual activity. The high breeders in the west are muslims and blacks and latinos, with only latinos being able to reliably reach class escape velocity. Most new kids are net negative, and the Asians have bet on robots. Not necessarily the best bet, but if their societies collapse it'll just fall over dustily, not ruined from within by disgruntled 'minorities'.
Dean
8m ago
I think there's a significant possibility of disagreement on that point. Wasn't Athena the goddess of war?
Athena was the goddess of war and wisdom, i.e. strategy. While she was portrayed with a helmet and a spear, she- and her following cities like Athens- weren't really known for mobilizing the women into formations. She is much more of an advisor / general archetype than a warrior.
philosoraptor
10m ago
Option 1) Play the bigger man. Pardon himself, obviously, and a few limited other people. Beyond that do nothing. This will prevent a wider conflagration in the culture war. Downside: without a tit-for-tat, the left will be emboldened for much greater tats in the future.
Are you saying you didn't write this?
Also, the piece I replied to was your direct response to the question, referring directly to what I've quoted above, "Is there any time you can point to where he's behaved with such magnanimity?". Like, it's literally what you gave as an example of that, or so anyone would think from reading that part of the thread. I think the "misunderstanding", if it is that and not just revisionist history, is pretty damn understandable.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
46m ago
Obviously not the parent poster, but one glaring thing about the whole essay is that she doesn't seem to waste a single word of reflection on what she, or the other women she talks about, could have done to avoid the bad outcomes they experienced. A good start would be to spend some thought on questions like: why was I attracted to the guy that turned out to be a jerk? What did he say that made me believe he would be or do something he actually wouldn't? Could I have recognised the deception beforehand? Were some experiences better than others? What set those apart? Is there a way I could optimise in that direction in the future? Instead, she is lamenting it in the fashion of people who complain that everything on TV is boring, or social media addicts who lament that their social media is toxic and make periodic shows of quitting it, only to inevitably come back and resume being prime contributors to it being toxic for everyone else.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
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'.
This is a kind of stupid on the part of the Asian (South or East, at least based on my British experience) parents that makes the stupid in Western sexual culture look mild. Enjoy your 0.8 TFR, Chonky.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
Bizarre stuff, though it is eye-opening.
Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex? No, they have to go after the fratty chad/dudebros who all want to have anal sex and constantly pressure them. Who even wants to have anal sex with women? There's a hole specifically designed for penis, free of feces and it's right there!
The author's career as an onlyfans star shows that she knows that there are a bunch of unassertive and unthreatening men who are very interested in relationships with women, men she plans to exploit financially! A 7 goes for 9s and 10s and is shocked to discover the 10 has more options and is less likely to settle, what a cruel world... Only this 7 is busy doing the exact same thing to 5s and 4s on a ruthless, depersonalized, industrial scale.
ace
2hr ago
Evaluating wanting to have the act of sex outside of the context of a relationship with a guy is putting the cart before the horse. It flows out of getting to know somebody. Imagine how the trajectory of this lady's life would have changed if she had just gotten together with an steady boyfriend and had sex if and when she felt comfortable enough and attracted enough to that particular guy, not the abstract idea of sex where the guy is a placeholder. Were no men trying for long term relationships with her? Or were they, and she was just oblivious? Maybe she could have attracted more or better male attention using the guide @No_one posted the other day on what men are actually attracted to (https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/).
There is absolutely zero medical basis for virginity.
Virginity isn't real.
As an aside, she (like most people TBF) seems pretty oblivious to evolutionary psychology, and what sex and virginity meant to illiterate goat herders with no access to antibiotics or pregnancy tests or STD tests and how that shaped sexual strategies and the evolution of our emotions and culture. From an evolutionary standpoint for men, the absolute worst case reproductive outcome is raising somebody else's kid. Guarding against that possibility occupies a lot of young men's thoughts. In all of human history, we in the last 60 years are the weird ones, where we can plan pregnancies and detect/manange/treat STDs.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
7hr ago
No, they used another (consenting) actress's voice who happens to sound a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.
That Altman referenced "Her" does not really bear on this. You can like or dislike the world portrayed in Her. Personally I found it a pretty uplifting vision of what a near-singularity future could look like, at least up to a few minutes before the ending. And you can like or dislike the voice that they demoed. Personally I can't stand it, and the sultry, flirty, overtly sexy affect really doesn't appeal to me. (But I'm a homo, so presumably I'm not the target audience, and maybe I'd be a big fan of some Josh Hartnett soundalike with an analogously please-fuck-me inflection, I dunno.) But neither has anything to do with whether Scarlett Johansson has somehow been wronged. She hasn't.
In any event, my distaste for the voice apparently was widely enough shared that they nixed it. But that just reflects a decent product sensibility and indicates nothing about this incredibly stupid attempt at a gotcha by you or all of the anti-progress Redditors who are joining you in hate-jerking over this as we speak.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22hr 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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
I have.
I Am The Very Model Of A Culture-Warring Partisan, but the one good thing that has come from Biden's presidency is him slamming the door shut on the Afghanistan war. I credit him greatly with having the guts to do it, and I am pretty sure the disaster in the pullout was deliberate insubordination on the part of the Pentagon. For everything I've read about the incompetence of the occupation, I cannot bring myself to believe that they are actually incapable of executing an orderly pullout. To my knowledge, no one has ever been held accountable for the mess, and I'd really like to see that happen.
Silverdawn
I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop
3hr ago
Some people seem to think Rashida Jones was used for the initial AI voice.
Personally, I think whatever happens, this is a win for OpenAI/Microsoft/Sam Altman.
The likely worst-case legal scenario is a lawsuit followed by settling out of court for a trivial amount.
As far as public opinion, there are essentially 3 groups of people:
Group 1 doesn't care about this silly drama
Group 2 are the neon-haired neo-feminists who will scream about evil misogynistic capitalists on social media
Group 3 are techbros and people at the top of companies whose reaction will be "Wait, Sam Altman has created a real-life version of Samantha from Her? When can I get a copy and how much???"
People will probably try to hurt Sam Altman as has happened to the likes of Elon Musk and Rowling but I don't see that going anywhere. The US government doesn't have a problem with him and the OpenAI board has already been "cleansed of disloyal elements", to put it bluntly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Back in the day, fathers and brothers would take it upon themselves to defend the woman's honor. If a man slept with a woman under false pretenses of a long-term relationship and then just abandoned her, they would beat the crap out of him, ostracize him, and possibly even kill him.
In goatfucker patriarchy, male family members would "defend a woman's honour" by killing her first. Whether they go on to deal with the man depends on the clan politics of the situation - punishing him is a nice-to-have for the standard honour-culture reasons, but not a social obligation. Farha Khalidi is Arab and claims to have been raised in an at least somewhat traditional Arab Muslim family, so she is seeing this through the lens of goatfucker patriarchy, not Christian purity culture. This is based on a (correct) assumption that getting into a situation where illicit sex can happen almost always involves mutual co-operation, and also on the practical issue that the no-longer-virginal woman is damaged goods regardless of fault and therefore her continued existence is embarrassing to the family.
The notorious Jeb Rubenfeld rape article points out that similar ideas exist in the English common law of rape - before feminism, "rape" was a carve-out for the small subset of illicit sex which was 100% the man's fault. Trad Christian culture solved this problem with shotgun weddings, which are not okay in a culture with strong arranged marriage norms. Modern Christian purity culture deals with it by denying the agency of teenage girls and allowing Daddy to lie to himself that she was mind-controlled into it by Chad's magic thunder cock, so punishing Chad is a sufficient solution.
sliders1234
6hr ago
No one mentioned this. But I am getting she made it up vibes for the rape. They just met some random dude on a train and her friend was fall over drunk. Who happened to be really sweet and carried her home. The other friend then decides to leave her friend with random dude when her friends unconscious. The University kicked the guy out because he raped her, but no mention of criminal charges.
Somehow I doubt the price of pussy is so low in college that it can’t ask a guy to wait an hour or even a day.
Overall the story felt like it was honest. But the rape story feels heavily embellished if not made up.
Supah_Schmendrick
13hr 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.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
12hr 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."
Botond173
5hr ago
Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex?
These women are very unlikely to put themselves in social situations where such a man takes the initiative, and they themselves obviously won't take the initiative with any man.
jeroboam
13hr 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.
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.
You seem to buy the leftist propaganda that "owning the libs" is about bullying rather than destroying the enemy's ability to wage war.
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 btw my coworkers are filthy white colonizers" 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.
Not many, but any marathon with a sufficiently large cash prize will have many Kenyans or Ethiopians competing, and the Boston Marathon is no exception. Since the start of this century, the men's and women's divisions saw a combined six winners who weren't Kenyan or Ethiopian (and one was an American citizen who was born in Ethiopia to Ethiopian parents).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
He has seen into the abyss and with that you are still a viable candidate. That speaks about both the alternatives he is aware of and likely his calculus of what the baseline mental state of the educated Indian male of your social stature. If his daughter is hot go for it, and rub it in your brothers face that you overcame adversity.
Absolutely. Reject modernity, embrace tradition, take the arranged-marriage-pill. Your family knows what's best for you @self_made_human, listen to them.
It's an indication someone is thinking before speaking. Unless you give someone an actual question that requires thinking through, it's very unusual to be like that and it instantly makes me suspicious.
The guy did it constantly.
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