domain:npr.org
hydroacetylene
50m ago
Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?")
Obviously such things are pretty light in available sources, but both Ancient Rome(plays in this case) and the late 19th century had mass-consumption media that describes courting for the hoi polloi in those societies, and Christian moralists writing in the early modern period provide another window. They describe a system in which husbands were often much older than wives, the woman’s parents were very involved(it seems pretty clear that Laura’s father gives his approval for Almanzo to begin showing interest in her in Little House on the Prairie), and that economic factors and reputation were considered the most important things in a potential suitor. One has to imagine, given that fathers tend to love their daughters, that screening out potential abusers would have been taken seriously in societies where husbands had the right of corporal punishment over their wives, but it’s not the sort of thing you see in mass media.
hydroacetylene
45m ago
I did, to make fun of them both being a meme at the same time.
Pynewacket
45m ago
and I believe retains some fraction of it's original spirit
can you define its "original spirit"?
Supah_Schmendrick
44m ago
Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead. But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.
You're missing something. There are three separate states being talked about here.
(1) the anguish of mentally-anticipating the pain of being raped.
(2) the in-the-moment physical experience of being raped.
(3) the mental anguish experienced in the wake of being raped, through recollections, PTSD, etc.
Each of these three is a separate experience, all tied to the concept of "being raped." A rape victim who says they wish the had died instead of being raped may well be saying that, now knowing what (2) and (3) are like, she would have preferred to never go through them and die instead without having had those experiences. But, having gone through them, dying now would not retroactively alleviate the anguish that has been already experienced.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
44m ago
I've been thinking about how I've seen some racist accounts go "Of course the elites aren't trying to do population reduction expect among the whites, look at Africa!", and I'm like... do they just take the fertility rate crash in Asia as granted? Because when it comes to population control efforts, Asia was until recently way more a target for them than Africa (often simply because the African infrastructure was not developed enough for basically any international efforts expect for very basic health measures and like to have any effect), such population control measures were often directly connected to Western efforts (like referred in this ACX post), and it should also be pretty uncontroversial that such population control measures have worked very rapidly, bringing TFR in many countries from 6-7 to around 1 in decades.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
41m ago
The protagonist exists in what is, essentially a linear corridor, and he can only move forward. Whatever he may want to do, there's nothing he can do but move forward.
That's certainly a very interesting thing to consider.
Philosophy, meanwhile, is mostly confusion.
Yes, precisely. That is the intent.
If there were one sentence to summarize philosophy, it would be the line Heidegger chose to inaugurate Being and Time:
"We, however, who used to think we understood, have become perplexed."
sun_the_second
40m ago
I do want to drive my car wherever I want.
there342
40m ago
To be fair, Half-Life at least revels in this. Gordon Freeman is a prisoner compelled to complete the narrative by the G-Man, rather than fulfilling the experience for no reason.
That said I can relate to your experience, there's something to be said of how trapped they make you feel taken at face value.
hydroacetylene
39m ago
So sometime between 1970-1980, depending on social circumstances. That was the cutoff point, I think.
There were actually two sexual revolutions. One just after WWI, where a greater degree of free choice, longer period of courtship, smaller age gaps, and other things we associate with the west as opposed to other cultures today became the norm, and a second one where people admitted to having fornicated.
For pre-first sexual Revolution courtships, read a little house on the prairie. One of the books is functionally the story of how it went down(I remember the story of my great-grandparents, who were on the very tail end of this system). A minority of conservative Christians want to bring the system back, but as any of them could tell you, it’s not working very well.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
37m ago
the sauna, the banya
Can confirm this is still the place of choice for negotiating government-adjacent contracts. I don't know if that's the same in Finland, but perhaps @Stefferi does.
It doesn't even have to do anything with sexual degeneracy, just the shared experience of men baring it all in front of each other and sharing a drink (or dozen) in a relaxing setting.
hydroacetylene
35m ago
North garland is probably going to continue to increase in value, but I wouldn’t guess anything about school quality in Texas until after we see what the legislature does about school choice- garland ISD could well wind up not mattering very much.
2rafa
34m ago
Imagine if black people and Muslims in America were allowed to have 4 kids each but white people were only allowed to have 1 child each. That was literally state policy in China until recently. I don’t know how you can say that’s better than the US.
Well it's true what they say, good gameplay can redeem anything.
Hell if you can make me suffer through the literal vomit inducing aesthetics of Cruelty Squad because the immersive sim loop is just that good, you can probably make a talk-to-shoggoth simulator that people will play even if that part of it is tedious.
But there is something to say about the narrative being less in your face. All the praise given to Dark Souls is not for nothing. It is true that the same minimalist approach in a shittier game would only make it boring, but the same amount of salt I put on my potato would ruin a strawberry cake.
There has to be a way you can weave these new tools into a good game, and whoever finds it will get bragging rights for the next decade at the least and a world spanning empire at the most.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
And to note- there is a population control push ongoing in Africa, it’s not particularly working any better than anything else in that continent, but it’s definitely there and definitely a western liberal elite project, and the opponents to it are overwhelmingly conservatives who bemoan low western birthrates!
haroldbkny
29m ago
I have, at times, suffered what seemed to me like episodes of minor existential horror contemplating the 'world' of narrative driven games like say, Half-Life 2. The protagonist exists in what is, essentially a linear corridor, and he can only move forward. Whatever he may want to do, there's nothing he can do but move forward.
I think I can relate to this a little bit. I have felt similarly, and also this feels to me to be related to a feeling I always have at the end of great games, and especially RPGs. The whole time, you're getting more leveled up, or maybe even you, the player, are getting more skilled. Until at one point, you have done everything you can do in the game. And then that's it. All the levels you've acquired that felt so dopaminergic, and all the skill you have is essentially worthless.
This also reminds me of One Punch Man. I think I remember hearing that the creator based it on the feeling of being overpowered in a video game. You feel like you could do anything, but there's just nothing to do.
To me, that's a lot of what real depression is all about. When I'm depressed, life to me feels like a hallway where I have no choice, and sometimes also feels like I could do whatever I want, but there's nothing interesting to do.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
28m ago
Yes, I do too, but I'd rather not have the wheels come off while I'm driving.
hydroacetylene
27m ago
Country clubs and golf courses in Texas(and probably most of the rest of the south, I’ve just no experience there) have ‘locker rooms’ which have comfy chairs and serve drinks.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
25m ago
I’ve got to ask you to be more specific. Make your case politely and firmly. If you skip to the conclusion, you’re just booing your outgroup.
2rafa
25m ago
Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain.
Non-Han minorities have received privileges that American leftists could never dream of. Imagine if the left restricted white parents to one child while allowing black and brown people to have unlimited children. The CHAZ and Star Wars are nothing compared to that.
Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.
Have you watched ‘Masters of the Air’ (2024)? It’s the successor show to Band of Brothers, it’s very patriotic and features a majority white male cast. I don’t think the occasional line about ‘But Black People Were Still Oppressed’ changes that. A rare negative review in Ars Technica said:
The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy.
Now, you can argue that no Chinese outlet would publish that about Battle at Lake Changjin, but it’s not clear that that’s really something negative about the US in comparison.
2D3D
24m ago
Frankly women can enter as well, were it not for the nannying and tutting. The sex adjacent focus in Asia is a combination of degeneracy and ability to exclude schoolmarms. There does exist the interesting female equivalents of private high teas in Hong Kong and johnny bars in Japan where female managers of their husbands wealth end up forming consortiums to buy up Canadian and London property but that is a different tale.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
24m ago
I could imagine it of there was a billion Americans, and it came with none of the self-flagellation. Sorry but there just is no comparison between the two approaches.
sun_the_second
23m ago
How does "more choice in a videogame" map to "wheels come off"???
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18m ago
Reject white nationalism.
Embrace Davos conspiracies.
2rafa
16m ago
I don’t think you really mean that. Would you accept a permanent end to affirmative action, bans on any DEI, guaranteed meritocracy in public and private employment and harsh crackdowns on any racial identitarianism (white or black) in exchange for limits on the number of kids white people could have?
It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US. The specific flavor of anti-racism in America is largely unique to the Anglosphere, progressivism isn’t.
How much repression a political regime commits is a function of its weakness rather than its ideological character or theoretical 'system'. Stalin's communist party committed mass political repression because it was the only way for the regime to survive. The US regime under Obama's presidency committed very little political repression because its headwinds were weak; the moment it ran into a slight uptick in resistance in the mid-2010s, this was revealed to be from lack of need rather than a principled tolerance built into its constitution.
Repression in the USA now seems comparable to the more muted level of the USSR between Khrushchev and Glasnost. Its methods are different. But, as an individual, it is impossible to question the ruling ideology of the US without reprisals that eject one from any decision-making or managerial role in any important organization. Groups, meanwhile, will be harassed with impunity by mobs and lawfared into submission or irrelevance, as you can see with VDARE.
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