domain:gurwinder.substack.com
PierreMenard
1m ago
I'd wager it'd just be a pragmatic decision. The majority, wealthiest portion of consumers is 40+ years old, age groups where you can't seriously compete in most sports. People who are both wealthy enough to spend money on competitive sports equipment and in an age range where competition even makes sense are a very small fraction of the population.
I wouldn't be surprised if these brands' marketing started looking more like drug ads 'after my hip-replacement surgery I wasn't sure I would still be able to run, but the new Nike SwiftMax give me just the right amount of support to keep going...'
non_radical_centrist
2m ago
I mean she is doing porn for money now
Is that an actual bad outcome? She earns far more money than she would using her degree. If it's solely as a result that it'll be harder for her to find a job or a man after she ages and Only Fans doesn't work for her anymore, what'd go wrong with changing society not to hold Only Fans as a black mark against her?
non_radical_centrist
4m ago
How do you think women should behave when it comes to modern dating and hook ups?
NewCharlesInCharge
8m ago
At my job it's enough to point to the potential for things to go wrong to be able to guard against them.
Supah_Schmendrick
11m ago
sliders1234
15m 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.
Supah_Schmendrick
16m ago
aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom.
This isn't actually true. White people used to care about seeing people of their own race in their media, but during the Civil Rights era have pretty much stopped doing that. Black people, on the other hand, really want to see themselves, and haven't stopped. (source: Lenk, Hartmann & Sattler; "White Americans’ preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 years: A meta-analysis" PNAS, Vol. 121, No. 9)
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
18m ago
There are no men with guns willing to actually fight for progressive values and Our Democracy(tm).
As the response to Trump's suggestion of using the military to stop BLM riots, there are; we call them the US military. The officers are blue now, the rank-and-file are not all that red, and many are minorities A red state governor trying anything likely ends up being crushed.
Tomato
20m ago
The premise that “24 year old female virgin” is a rare specimen is in itself pretty interesting.
sliders1234
20m ago
Yesterday it was true that there were no man with guns willing to fight for progressive values.
Tomorrow it is possible. The AI guys and people like Sergei Brin perhaps. And of course I am referring to drone tech.
Dean
22m 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.
Rov_Scam
23m ago
Prosecuting the Tides foundation isn't going to do much. As a "dark money" organization most people haven't heard of them the way they've heard of the NRA, so the chance that anyone will actually care is low. Furthermore, as a foundation, they don't actually do anything themselves but simply distribute money to other groups. It takes a long time for an advocacy organization like the NRA to build up the donor network and social capital to have the kind of influence they've had. If you're just distributing money, there's plenty of other advocacy organizations that can easily take up that slack.
The biggest problem, though, is that most of the alleged malfeasance on the part of Tides is directed towards liberal advocacy groups who claim they mismanaged money intended for their benefit. For example, they're currently being sued in California by BLM, who claims the group misdirected 33 million in funds that were raised as part of a joint campaign and were supposed to be earmarked. Any other prosecutions are going to be in a similar vein. It's hardly an own of the libs if most libs haven't heard of the group you're prosecuting and the ones who have are likely to be your star witnesses. If BLM ends up siding with the administration it's hardly a good look.
Well I did more than skim; I would ask you do the same before passing judgement on my analysis. There are some deeply troubling stories in her narrative that don't line up with what I know about the college world, most people I know met their life partner in college and it sounds like she didn't even give it a shot. There are many ways to have a fulfilling sex life, including exclusive monogamy, she was too fucked up by her upbringing to try any of them.
I mean she is doing porn for money now, something went wrong. None of the "sluts" I met in college are doing that, they are all happily married with a few kids, mostly with people they met in college.
SlowBoy
24m 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.
Supah_Schmendrick
27m ago
There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition
Bad history. The Inquisition was set up precisely to stop idiot rubes out in the sticks from freaking out about nonsense like "witches making the cows' milk dry up" and burning people. The Spanish crown then won a political struggle with the Papacy, asserted control over the office in the area under its secular jurisdiction, then started using it as a secret police against perceived fifth columnists and as a revenue source.
non_radical_centrist
29m ago
The solution is for women to apply their own agency and to stop sleeping with those 5% of men who are dirtbags.
non_radical_centrist
30m 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.
I came to something of the opposite conclusion. She was condemning purity culture and sex positive feminists, but wasn't ultimately trying to stop them. That this essay was targetted at women to convince them not to engage in sex that will make them unhappy, and to inform them that it's not anti-feminist to remain a virgin. That they can and should take responsibility for their happiness in relationships and not allow themselves to be manipulated.
non_radical_centrist
32m ago
So what's your alternative solution? Do you support purity culture, or have a fourth option beyond purity culture, sexual liberation, or the author's solution of a world where people are not concerned with purity but do properly reflect on whether a hook up will actually make them happy?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
35m 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?
Rov_Scam
38m ago
The problem there is that going after voter fraud in a non-grandstanding way means he actually needs to name names and have evidence. You can't just say there was MASSIVE FRAUD in Detroit or wherever; you have to actually say here is a corrupt election official and here's exactly what he did and here's the evidence to prove it. Most of the voter fraud stuff in 2020 was more along the lines of "I don't like the looks of this", which doesn't exactly help you out too much when it comes to a prosecution.
Supah_Schmendrick
40m 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.
hydroacetylene
40m ago
It’s the Economy, Stupid.
Many negros are antisemitic, but not in the sense of giving two shits about Israel or Palestinians. On the other hand, like most working class voters they’re very exposed to price increases and inflation is one of the few things that can lead to substantial black defections from the DNC machine.
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.
That's a pretty hot take and I very much disagree with it. I think they often express less agency than men, and that that is partially biological, but they still have plenty of agency. And through changing culture like what the article advocates for, women can have even more agency. And that'd be a great thing.
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