domain:academic.oup.com
non_radical_centrist
6m ago
I'm not at all convinced that that "pair bonding" is a super significant phenomenon. I think it's quite likely that instead those stats reflect that women who want varied sex will have multiple partners before marriage, and then will also desire varied partners after getting married, leading to her divorcing or leading to her cheating which leads to divorcing. Especially since a lot of women who don't have sex before marriage come from cultures where divorce is socially unacceptable.
What would be more convincing is instead of stats about divorce, since that's distorted by women who're socially unable to divorce even if they'd want to, is stats on how much women who haven't had previous partners like their spouse.
Recursive_Enlightenment
12m ago
How does using a voice that sounds like Scarlett Johansson's harm anyone? Perhaps it was illegal, but you shouldn't claim it was evil unless you can identify the harm done.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
13m ago
Because anything else sets up a couple for a less good pair bond. The long forgotten reason purity cultures form is they are supposed to create a strong pair bond because the pleasure of sex is associated with only one person, their spouse. And without those strong pair bonds couples aren't willing to risk child rearing at population replacement levels.
I don't think the social technology to do it right is even possible to develop in a world where porn and birth control are legal and easily available.
2D3D
20m ago
Right NOW there are endless attempts by academics and other leftists to prove that Europe was always filled by blacks and muslims in order to stymie opposition to mass migration. The ridiculous muslim viking for one, and all the kvetching about multicultural britain being deliberately excluded from history. The objective is to twist history to a postulation rather than a record, to serve a Current Thing. We already see the next evolution whereby Joan of Arc is trans. Don't be surprised if we discover Charlemange was actually a woman or that the Reconquista is just islamophobia.
Sunshine
24m ago
That depends on what you mean by 'succeeding.' Trump went into his first term with no plan for how to staff his administration. As I see it, the main goal of Project 2025 is just to work on that stuff in advance so that if Trump wins another term he won't have to start from scratch the day after the election. Will it revolutionize the US government forever? No. But at least this time he'll have a list of names he can draw from to fill government positions with loyalists.
And they don't really have to be competent. It would be an improvement over the first term if the bureaucracy was just not actively working against Trump's administration.
non_radical_centrist
26m ago
Generally matches my experience too. Also I don't think I've encountered any women who have gone "oh no I've never done this tee hee", they were all pretty up front with their experience if the conversation went there, or did genuinely have little experience. Although it's not impossible I was taken in by excellent liars, I doubt it.
2D3D
35m ago
Empire of Dust
If anyone ever wants to understand Chinese racism, watch the documentary of the same name. Chinese are racist, yes, but the animating force is disgust at perceived incompetence. To have squandered the legacy of colonial infrastructure for no discernible private benefit and not even a permanent elevation of ones tribal standing strikes Chinese as a supreme and unnecessary waste.
2D3D
42m ago
Right on both counts. No misspelled sea urchin weapon fighting style unfortunately
PierreMenard
47m ago
I highly doubt that this particular trope would play as well in traditionalists societies. I don't think you can pin this on the WAW phenomenon because it manifests in the exact opposite way in certain cultures: it'd be considered immoral to send women into combat if it wasn't laughable as a concept.
I think there's a significant possibility of disagreement on that point. Wasn't Athena the goddess of war?
I'm sure there are many other examples, from the common witch to the royalty/divinity, where female characters gained the might to defeat men through supernatural means.
Another aspect of it is that having out-of-context female characters opens up different modes of storytelling such as romance, motherhood, which randomly making one of the character browner does not really do.
gattsuru
54m ago
Paxton's condescension at the opposition probably isn't great for the longer-term stability of the nation, but in terms of direct impact, I'm more worried about everybody else. If the future were dominated by the most authoritarian political movements in the country stomping each other's faces, well, it'd be bad, but I can't say it would be bad because of the poor innocent jerks.
It's the people in the crossfire. There's always some fuzzy edges where maybe the immigration enforcement is rough-handed to discourage illegal immigrants, or maybe the LGBT restrictions are breaking privacy For The Children, or what have you, but there's also times where people are pretty obviously hammering a matter to drum up attention, or even just because they'd be expensive in human and financial and political capital to defend, and Paxton hasn't hesitated.
Paxton's far from unique in this, and I'm not sure he's even in the top ten. If politics were the proverbial game of chicken, we've long since gone from simply throwing the steering wheel out the window, to shooting a hired driver and cutting the brake lines. But Garland's been bad enough, and we don't need two in a row.
jeroboam
55m ago
Sam Altman just loves to be a sociopath and then brag about it. His latest?
https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
"Her".
In case you've been living under a rock, this is in reference to the 2013 movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays the voice of an AI girlfriend. And it's also a reference to Open AI's new product, Chat GPT 4o, whose voice sounds just like... you guessed it, Scarlett Johansson.
This is no mistake. Open AI actually approached Ms. Johansson and asked her permission to use her voice. When she said no, they said fuck it and did it anyway.
https://x.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
If Elon Musk is chaotic neutral, Sam Altman is increasingly proving himself to be lawful evil. It's not a good look.
Tomato
57m ago
Yeah I tend to agree, I met a 30 year old virgin on a dating app. She was good looking and socially normal, just had never really gotten around to it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
What do you want exactly, in concrete terms?
Presumably you want a return to pre-1960s norms surrounding sex. But what does that entail and how do you enforce it? Is it just a shift in soft cultural norms, or are there actual policy changes?
PierreMenard
1hr ago
Well, I was referring to all people in general. Even for white Westerners, I wager that the effect you describe is driven by a significantly different demographic than the average gamer. I'd be surprised if this was not also a factor in the rising popularity of Japanese/Korean animated media over Hollywood's muddied productions.
gattsuru
1hr 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.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
Can you explain what that means, and what your justification for that claim is?
Onystri
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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!
1hr 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.
Forgotpassword
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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.
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.
Which is great for about the top 2 standard deviations but leaves the other 95% of the people drifting with far too few navigational aids.
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