domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
57m ago
Wasn't something like that the canonical origin of Night City, of Cyberpunk fame?
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
59m ago
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have all it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her ambitions in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed.
This is my lived experience, but it took my wife entering a well-compensated corporate position in her mid '30s where her superiors were mothers of young children for her to entertain the idea of kids. Before that (and I mean, from her late-teens when I first met her), she had a laser-focus on her career.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
As I neurotically must bring up in every topic on fertility, the “Abraham Orthodox” (Amish, Haredi) have retained very high birth rates despite the latter living in the densest and most expensive part of the country and having very little money. What they do differently, and what others don’t do, is (1) make motherhood the only real female social value, and (2) train women at a young age to be mothers adept at homemaking tasks. My hobby horse comes out of this battle unscathed.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint.
This isn’t true.
I can buy a large pizza and a 12 pack and settle into videogaming while pigging out. I can make an organic healthy meal for after returning from the gym. These imply the exact same level of concern for my fellow man- it’s simply a differentiation between long term consequences(for myself) vs short term pleasure(also for myself). Like sure, one indicates better character than the other. But it’s not about selfishness. It’s about- I think mostly time preference and discipline.
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
A few miscellaneous stories to start us off:
Peru
The president of Peru has signed a decree classifying gender identity disorders as a mental illness and offering coverage for them under the national health insurance plan.
Thailand
The Thai government is considering building a planned city to relocate the business districts of Bangkok due to rising sea levels, perhaps inspired by the similar Indonesian project to relocate their capital.
Ireland
Ireland is moving to recognize Palestinian statehood, making them the first nation in western Europe to do so, as far as I know. The historical relationship between the Irish and Palestinian nationalist movements means this was perhaps to be expected.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
Would you still find the fourth point bad if the resulting mask-off mandate were primarily used against your tribe - say, retroactive dragnet identification of the Jan 6th protesters from photos, or police demanding that any future garden-variety right-wing protester unmask while being fully aware that the leftists are already standing by with cameras to feed a well-oiled machine of crowdsourced doxxers ready to send form letters to his bank and employer?
This sort of thing has been a long-standing concern of lefties dating back to when they had a more credible claim that institutional power is aligned against them. The way I see it, the right wing, in its knee-jerk opposition to masks and affinity towards police powers, is interrupting the left in the midst of making a rare mistake borne of their denial that they are in charge. The train of a sympathetic police getting to use this to unmask and prosecute someone like BLM rioters has long left.
Tenaz
1hr ago
the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime
It's really just when concealing your identity in general.
12.7:
No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
generates more economic value
Actually we can’t say this. At least not what it really denotes. Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems. Stressed and older women and women who do not breastfeed correctly or nurture correctly are more likely to have children with autism. Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent, and the productivity gains from the very intelligent are outsized. Although there is not a study on this next one, it’s likely that stressed working women lead to unhappier, less healthy husbands, which cuts the productivity of all men, while also sapping their political participation due to household multitasking.
It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers. For the best of both worlds, restrict the lowest stress occupations to young women. And then if we really cared about wealth (what economic productivity ought to denote) we can ban makeup and so on. It’s truly dystopian to think that there are double doctor households where the male doctor is more stressed because he doesn’t have a homemaker to rely on, the female doctor (an intelligent woman who you want having lots of children) is delaying childbirth and then having only 1-2 less healthy and less intelligent children with a high rate of autism, and at the end of the day they are both unhappy despite being “economically productive”, and the naive economists think this is somehow a net gain for the country because their profession is narrow minded.
I was wrong about Japan, it appears, but Italy, Greece and Romania all have anomalously low female LFPR for the developed world with still southern-European TFR.
And as for Israel, secular Jews have a TFR that’s still higher than any majority population in the developed world, unless you count the American red tribe which is roughly at parity. Modern Orthodox Jews(who still work) have a TFR like America in the height of the baby boom. The ultraorthodox are the only ones who don’t work.
Stellula
1hr ago
Heat death is high information density though as a description of the state.
Maybe from an information theory perspective, non-information bits are thought of as cold or empty.
faceh
1hr ago
My model of modern western women™ is basically this:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
- High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
- Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party.
- Devoted and effective mother.
They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.
Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.
If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have all it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her ambitions in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.
NewCharlesInCharge
1hr ago
That'll teach me not to refresh in a separate tab before hitting post!
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
One interesting feature of this map is that Kurds have a much higher fertility rate than ethnic Turks. I'm not sure how salient this fact is to Turkish politicians, but it is notable that Erdogan has been trying to roll back the Turkish nationalist project started by Ataturk and return to a more pan-Islamic culture that could potentially function better in a situation where Turks become a minority either through internal demographic replacement or outward conquest as in the Ottoman days.
Spookykou
1hr ago
I am a bit confused by the direction and nature of the relationships you are purposing here. It seems to me that you are saying there is a rise in 'selfishness' because governments 'lost trust', by favoring marginalized demographics. I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.
I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
Numbers are only useful if we know occupational breakdown of women. Obvious a part time service work position is not going to impinge on birth rates.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
I beat you to it by six minutes!
But yeah, to me, this is about as blatant of an example of the media often lying as you're going to find. Any attempt to rescue this from being an example of the media often lying is going to rely on the most pedantic possible reading of the text of articles while completely ignoring the titles.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
1hr ago
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
Maybe this comes down to a drive for status and status alone? If they are encultured in a society that gives less status to mothers/housewives than it does to those in corporate positions, moving up the corporate pecking order would be the rational choice for a status-seeking agent. The exceptions—Mormons, traditional Catholics, Amish, etc.—are cultures that afford status to mothers of larger broods of children.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
If we step out of the realm of absolutes and extremes, I think we can say that a preference for some degree of chastity in a partner is real and good, or at least a perfectly legitimate preference. My personal belief is that women who have had a large number of sexual partners tend to be emotionally damaged and are probably not going to be good long-term relationship choices. Preferring someone that has a more normal history seems just fine to me.
On the flip side, like you said, it's worth noting that just getting someone that has a fairly normal history isn't actually sufficient to tamp down the gnawing insecurity about the past. There really is a part of the male ego that many of us have to vary degrees that just wants to be the fucking best, period, completely unthreatened by those losers in the past. But then if they were losers, that devalues her! This whole mental spiral is just wildly unhelpful, so addressing it internally is worthwhile. Addressing it also doesn't mean completely throwing away the healthy alarm bell though - if you notice that someone really did hook up with dozens of guys, yeah, there's probably a problem there and it's good to not just smash that feeling.
Like so many emotions, the emotion has value, but needs to be balanced. Righteous anger is an appropriate response to some situations and a poor response to others. The correct approach to righteous anger isn't to try to eliminate it, it's to understand its origins and make sure that it's only triggering when it's actually appropriate. Likewise for the old green-eyed jealousy - you should feel like guarding your partner, but you can't take it to the extreme of getting all weepy because you're not the first partner a 25-year-old woman has had.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
I like it.
Specifically, I like it a lot better than the pseudo-stratification that we’re getting by relying on high deductible health plans.
NewCharlesInCharge
1hr ago
Remember the "don't say gay" bill? If you were being very charitable, you could say that the so-called "don't say gay" bill in Florida did prohibit "saying gay" in certain contexts, so I suppose the reporting on it comported with Scott's ideas on bounded distrust, that the media rarely concts outright lies.
But the reporting on North Carolina's HB 237 looks to consist of outright lies. Background: the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime, with a consequence that the class of misdemeanor or felony commited gets bumped up by one. During the pandemic they added an extemption to the law for thsoe wearing a mask for health reasons. HB 237 removes that exemption.
News media are reporting that North Carolina is banning mask wearing in public. Some examples of those spreading the idea that this is a general ban on public masking:
- Winston-Salem Journal: Bill to end masking in north Carolina clears Senate. Health advocates say completely barring masks could hurt people who are immunocompromised
- US News and World Report: North Carolina Lawmakers Push Bill to Ban Most Public Mask Wearing, Citing Crime
- Charlotte Observer: The party of ‘freedom’ wants to ban mask-wearing for health reasons in NC
WaPo adds some more context, and describes the law as a prohibition on masking during a crime, but still lies in their headline by saying that the bill bans mask wearing at protests generally:
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
That…isn’t that how it already works? It’s definitely true for speeding and vehicular manslaughter sentencing. I don’t really want to spend my afternoon looking for overpass suicides, but I would not expect the truck to be blamed in that scenario, either.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
Should I fix myself? No, it is the women who are wrong.
Could be true, but probably not very useful advice.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
And people say the U.S. is too car-centric!
This would be a terrible policy. People already burn their cars for insurance fraud. This adds an obvious incentive to cause personal injuries while you’re at it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
My favorite story of the day is an intersection of old Covid drama, current protest drama, and a healthy dose of TheMediaRarelyLiestm. Per the news headlines, NC Senate votes to ban people from wearing masks in public for health reasons:
The North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public for health reasons, following an emotional debate about the wisdom of the proposal.
Republican supporters of the ban said it would help police crack down on protesters who wear masks — which some lawmakers called a growing concern, saying demonstrators are abusing Covid-19 pandemic-era norms to wear masks that hide their identities.
Now, I will certainly admit to having a great deal of contempt for people that are still wearing masks and having immediately experienced some schadenfreude, but as someone that just doesn't really trust the media to rarely lie, I thought I had better go check what the bill actually says. As it turns out, what the bill does is strikethrough a temporary exemption that had been added as a Covid-era protection:
SECTION 1.(a) G.S. 14-12.11 reads as rewritten: 19 "§ 14-12.11. Exemptions from provisions of Article. 20 (a) Any of the following are exempted from the provisions of G.S. 14-12.7, 14-12.8, 21 14-12.9, 14-12.10 and 14-12.14: 22 (1) Any person or persons wearing traditional holiday costumes in season. 23
(2) Any person or persons engaged in trades and employment where a mask is 24 worn for the purpose of ensuring the physical safety of the wearer, or because 25 of the nature of the occupation, trade or profession. 26
(3) Any person or persons using masks in theatrical productions including use in 27 Mardi Gras celebrations and masquerade balls. 28
(4) Persons wearing gas masks prescribed in civil defense drills and exercises or 29 emergencies. 30
(5) Any person or persons, as members or members elect of a society, order or 31 organization, engaged in any parade, ritual, initiation, ceremony, celebration 32 or requirement of such society, order or organization, and wearing or using 33 any manner of costume, paraphernalia, disguise, facial makeup, hood, 34 General Assembly Of North Carolina Session 2023 Page 2 House Bill 237-Fourth Edition implement or device, whether the identity of such person or persons is 1 concealed or not, on any public or private street, road, way or property, or in 2 any public or private building, provided permission shall have been first 3 obtained therefor by a representative of such society, order or organization 4 from the governing body of the municipality in which the same takes place, 5 or, if not in a municipality, from the board of county commissioners of the 6 county in which the same takes place. 7
(6) Any person wearing a mask for the purpose of ensuring the physical health or 8 safety of the wearer or others.
The strikethrough in the quote is the only exemption eliminated by the change. The actual text of the criminal statute 14-12.7 is:
§ 14‑12.7. Wearing of masks, hoods, etc., on public ways. No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State. (1953, c. 1193, s. 6; 1983, c. 175, ss. 1, 10; c. 720, s. 4.)
The other sections say essentially the same thing, but for a few other contexts. The core of these is that it's illegal to use a mask to conceal the identity of a wearer in public places. The Covid-era text was being used as a way for people to conceal their identities and use the health carveout as a shield against the plain meaning of the law by playing the Taylor Lorenz card. In contrast, no, little old ladies going to medical appointments scared out of their minds and wearing N-95s aren't going to be stopped by police, because they're obviously not attempting to conceal their identity at health clinic.
One might be inclined to explore whether this is one of those rare media lies or whether they didn't quite technically lie, but I don't personally find that a terribly interesting game to play. Instead, I think the interesting thing to consider is why Democrats are so strongly opposed to this. I can see a few options, none of which are mutually exclusive. In roughly ascending order of badness:
-
They simply don't understand the law despite the plain text reading that indicates that the exemptions are only relevant in the case one that has actually violated the criminal statute in the first place. In being so confused, they think eliminating the exemptions really is banning people from wearing masks.
-
Distrust for Republicans runs so deep that despite the text being clear and obvious, they think that villainous right-leaning prosecutors will start filing charges against people that have done nothing other than go to their chemotherapy appointment with a mask on.
-
They don't really think there's anything wrong with the reversion, but they see it as a good opportunity to call Republicans fascist grandma-killers.
-
Support for protestors concealing their identity while behaving badly actually does run strong with some on the left and they see keeping the easy loophole of everyone just being able to claim it's for their health as a very good and important thing to do.
To me, these all make my opponents sound very bad! I don't think they're actually uncharitable though and suspect that some would just outright articulate the second and fourth options above as their rationale. For my part, I'll pre-register my prediction that the statute will only be used against people that are actually committing crimes, not against random mask enthusiasts that are otherwise doing nothing wrong. If I turn out to be wrong, it's time for some introspection.
Sure, selective enforcement is a concerning aspect of any potential criminal law, but this is also a fully general complaint. I don't want to protect right-wing rioters or left-wing rioters as a matter of principle though - it's the rioting I object to, not the political positioning of the rioters.
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