domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4m ago
Can you explain what that means, and what your justification for that claim is?
Onystri
4m 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
7m 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
8m 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!
9m 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
18m 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
19m 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
22m 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.
Forgotpassword
28m ago
I'd argue Yasuke is very close to being a fictional character that whoever's writing whatever media can project their own 'ooh there's a black guy in Japan' views upon. His historical context is like 2 lines of 'woah there's a black guy in Japan'.
non_radical_centrist
33m ago
I mean, apart from the likely impossibility of trying to change society as a whole?
I think we've come a hell of a lot closer to making porn not a black mark today than 50 years ago, I don't see why it should be impossible.
Just emptiness and depression
How does a law firm choosing to hire her without considering her Only Fans a black mark, and no judges or clients or juries holding it against her either, lead to emptiness and depression?
ChickenOverlord
37m ago
what'd go wrong with changing society not to hold Only Fans as a black mark against her?
I mean, apart from the likely impossibility of trying to change society as a whole? Just emptiness and depression, nothing major.
non_radical_centrist
38m ago
Why does purity have value? If you think it has an intrinsic value, why? If you think it only has value because it deeply shapes impressionable young women, then I think that's the exact argument the author makes.
non_radical_centrist
39m ago
Sure. I don't disagree. But the women should still stop sleeping with those men if the women can predict they'll regret it, which they should often be able to.
non_radical_centrist
40m ago
I'd agree with most of what you've said. But ultimately I think a better equilibrium is achievable than a Christian purity culture, although I probably couldn't convince you of that if you're operating off of Christians principles instead of utilitarianism. But I look at Christian purity culture and still see many failure ponits- e.g maritial rape, or to a lesser degree all the other ways a couple could get married and grow to dislike each other and would be much happier divorced. And I agree with you that the author overlooks the many women who do enjoy kink. Although I don't think she's saying they don't exist, just that many women are pressured into kink despite not enjoying it. And I think Christian purity culture also fails those women- if a girl would genuinely be happier engaging in BDSM with multiple different men a week, and those girls do exist I believe albeit they're rarer than some pop culture would lead you to believe, they should be free to pursue that. But I do think the sort of culture you paint would be my second choice. My first choice being a culture where everyone is aware of the biologically differences between men and women, and men are held accountable for sexual abuse but only sexual abuse that's real, and women are expected to exercise agency in identifying and seeking the outcomes that are actually best for her instead of just waiting for a hot man to ask her to hook up.
rverghes
54m ago
Yes, that's true.
I think that for the withdrawal to hurt Biden, there would need to be some proof of executive micromanaging, like overruling defence plans or imposing artificial restrictions on how the withdrawal was conducted.
Which probably didn't happen, other than maybe imposing a timeline over defence foot-dragging. (Though it might have, and both sides are keeping quiet to avoid burning each other.)
freemcflurry
56m ago
There was this one from this 2000s: https://youtube.com/watch?v=liKnJ-ejztw
So at least sometimes they did.
confuciuscorndog
58m ago
The male participation is more newsworthy, since the past 25 years has seen a 10% decrease of male labor participation compared to the ~3% decrease in female according to FRED.
Well, hopefully I've helped provide an explanation of that. And hopefully more and more men keep dropping out faster and faster. It has nothing to do with their selfishness though. It has everything to do with the selfishness of others who just expected them to keep slavishly giving and giving all that they always have traditionally while taking away more and more of the traditional benefits for their service.
Yeah, my bad. I didn't check properly and just assumed with you jumping in on behalf of a somewhat older original post you were the OP.
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.
There's also the part where the execution is quite explicitly not the President's job, and that framing a withdrawal order as something that required presidential micromanagement to not completely fuck up raises some extremely serious questions about the competence and professionalism of our military brass. I'm pretty sure the withdrawal fracas petered out the way it did because actually litigating the question would burn a whole lot of people, none of whom are named "Biden".
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."
sliders1234
1hr ago
The dirtbags eventually settle down and get married. To a great extent they are just following social norms. Sex comes early now. You figure out if you like someone after. It’s honestly bad manners not to sleep around if large parts of society.
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).
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.
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