I did. And this is one of the many reasons why I did not finish my PhD in Sociology and woke the fuck up.
That was one of the breaking points. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Warren Farrell (of Myth of Male Power) to give me the final push to get the fuck out. I keep his email framed on my wall.
I once had a PROFESSOR at Florida State University tell people to leave the room and come back in and re-address the room if they said "guys."
In graduate school.
A decade ago.
She was the department chair at the time. Yes, it was bullshit (Sociology).
As our parents used to say: "life isn't fair."
It is the height of hubris to suggest we can somehow make life fair or "equitable."
The "DC Establishment" isn't just Democrats. It's the club with Pelosi and Schumer and McConnell and Graham, where they all pretend to be bitter enemies but do act in coordinated ways to ensure their uniparty retains as much power as possible.
Trump was an outsider to that, obviously. So is DeSantis. But likewise are the Progressive democrats. Bernie was always too much of a cuck to break away and stand up for himself, but the loud "Democrats" that have infected Congress since 2016 are not so timid.
Biden was literally the best choice for the uniparty -- perhaps the only choice. Kamala is a perfect example of the political Peter Principle, and this is broadly true for all the younger 'establishment' dems like Booker and Booty-gig. It's always been about capturing the middle of the Democrat party voting bloc and extinguishing the progressives.
I think this is why there seem to be so many polls/controlled op pieces that insist the Dems are going to win despite ever-mounting evidence to the contrary. If the balance of Congress is close, maybe the Progressives remain in their tenuous alliance with the Dems -- but if Republicans resoundingly take back both houses? Civil War in the Dem party.
I like how Imp has basically dug his heels in on this issue for months (years?) at this point -- and it's getting harder and harder to argue against.
There were so many times in graduate school (when I was younger, more idealistic, and far less jaded) when I thought 'oh, my colleagues just have it wrong' or 'I can't wait to see how this new evidence opens their mind' only to see grad students and ostensibly smart PhDs twist themselves in mental knots to justify their psychosis.
I left graduate school in such despair, because you can't reason with these people. They're not being led by a 'cabal' or anything -- they're just stuck in the same sort of faulty logic/hubris that humans have succumbed to time and time again.
Part of it is also the underlying foundation of western civ is crumbling. These dumbed down standards aren't to ensure the bottom 10% graduates, but rather to avoid 80% failure rates.
Absolutely - because drug use and criminality and mental health crises are symptoms of a sick society. These interventions do nothing to fix the symptoms, which have continued to get worse (speaking about america here), and which will continue to get worse unless the root causes are addressed.
We are very far from having that open and frank discussion about how the plague of single motherhood is destroying the American dream.
Right? I was in the same boat. Portugal was the first, right? "Fewer criminals! It works!"
Yeah we now see exactly what they mean when they say fewer criminals... look at NYC and SF -- drug addicts in the gutters, violent criminals out no bail.
from the concert you went to, but as a girl you clearly couldn't have loved.
Not that you couldn't have loved it, just that a lot of people (mostly women) go places to be seen and to take pics for their social media. They don't give a shit about where they are or what's going on.
You know what I'm talking about if you've ever hear a young woman say she "loves concerts. I'm always going to concerts" but can't even name a favorite show she's ever been to.
No it's not.
If you want to assert feminist rhetoric is leading to increased male suicides you can't just hypothesize that and assert it as logically likely -- you have to show some sort of causation.
Right, but that's not stochastic terrorism. Stochastic Terrorism is the fanciful idea that when Trump says "I love and work for all Americans" it's really a dog whistle to his 'followers' to be violent towards some group that is considered to be "unamerican" -- as one example.
The logic is that as violence against target groups goes up, it must be ____ person's rhetoric -- which didn't call for violence -- but in other ways inspired people to be violent. Asian Hate Crimes/Violence was such a thing in the news because it was evidence of this "stochastic terrorism" because of Trump's language ("China Virus") -- which is stupid because it was mostly Asians getting assaulted by blacks in the inner cities that continue to decay into cultural dust.
When Maxine Waters spouts off about telling people they should go confront people - that's not stochastic terrorism, that's just plain old incitement to violence. And there's dozens of examples of this on the left.
I am wildly surprised you of all people used the term 'stochastic terrorism' which is just academic talk for "i can't find any direcy causality but my feelings tell me it's true."
Other than that, agree.
This is the cancerous nature of postmodernist ideology. Question everything, even obvious objective truths, and claim they are flawed or social constructs or racist or something.
It's just a slow and stupid revolution.
Women's actions and men's instinct to protect women.
I am starting to think The Boy Who Cried Wolf was about a woman the whole time. And they still don't get it.
This is far too close to postmodernist bullshit for my liking.
No, it's not an arbitrary line, though the exact placement of where the line should be is debatable. Country A has an age of consent of 16, Country B has an age of consent of 12. We can all probably agree that age-of-consent arranged marriages in Country B are wrong and can have something approaching a debate on Country A.
Obviously a girl is not "raped" when she is 17 and 364 days and 23 hours and 59 minutes old, and then 1 minute later she is magically able to engage in BDSM
You may not like it, but that's exactly what the law says. With Romeo and Juliet and other exceptions, of course, but that's the law.
Statutory Rape is NOT the equivalent to a violent rape, you're right. That's why states and jurisdictions typically have lighter sentencing with statutory rape -- because you have to take each case on a case-by-case basis. 22 year old with a 15 year old out in bumfuck, nowhere is a little bit less abnormal and gross than a 35 year old with a 14 year old in Boston.
There's also additional charges that make the underlying crime worse. Guy I grew up with had a relationship with a 14 year old when he was somewhere around 20. In the grand scheme of things probably a statutory rape charge and probation if that was it - except for the fact he drugged her and plied her with porn and essentially held her hostage in his house.
It's the extra circumstances that landed him in jail for a decade and on the sex offender list for life.
Statutory rape is a serious charge and can end up with you on a registry, but yeah I think most people can agree it's not always a heinous thing. But it's still a crime, because we agree as a society that individuals are largely incapable of making those sorts of decisions before the age of 18. Or 16. I hope not 14. Certainly not 12.
The line may be fuzzy, but it certainly exists.
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Cry Rape
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Stand back while your victim is lynched (in this case in the court of public opinion, because she already killed him).
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Post on Reddit about how horrible white people were to Emmitt Till for the 9000th time.
Normal course of events.
Also iirc they changed laws in 2020 so that all these mail in ballots were counted ahead of time and results were loaded soon after polls closed.
No bullshit "oh we found 100,000 more mail in ballots two days later"
It's kind of sad that this guy is just practicing good, ethical, honest inquiry and it stands out so much.
I want to also take a chance to praise the NHS because their data is as transparent as I could ask for. Yes, there's still the whole "with" vs. "because of" thing but the excess mortality data does do a good job of illustrating that excess deaths did go down following the rollout of the heart stoppers.
It also illustrates that efficacy wanes in a matter of weeks/months and then excess "sudden" deaths start, so I still wouldn't go near those shots with a 10-foot pole -- but I just thought that was interesting. Good job, NHS.
I couldn't agree with your later points more. Don't fret the 16-year old mind, though. It's been that way since the dawn of time and it is innately natural.
But beyond that - I wouldn't have a problem with "free" college if people spent a couple years in service, too. And that doesn't have to be military. Able bodied young adults are needed across the country to do various tasks and maintain infrastructure and civil services. Yes, we even need people to clean neighborhoods. A couple years of service is a fair exchange for an education. Maybe the universities would have to focus on educating people again, too.
This may end up being a solution to the single parent crisis, too. Giving kids some structure during their service years would go a long way towards fixing some of the deficits.
Why can't it be a social pressure that is biologically motivated? Human societies evolved these traits for survival in a different time, but we still have to answer to our biological instincts.
How much better the world would be if we leaned into our sexual dimorphism and brought the best manliness characteristics out alongside the best feminine characteristics.
You'd probably see a lot less mental illness. Our world and social order has changed dramatically in a very short amount of time, and not enough research has been done into how this "change in social ecology" has affected us.
Not quite.
That nice little southern girl who went to a nice conservative school has still had all of her education classes and most of her Gen Eds infiltrated with DEI bullshit. She says ya'll because she looks like a nice, well-adjusted person but is really just a Trojan Horse for the feminizing bullshit.
Remember all those jokes in the mid-2000s about the generation who never got told "No"?
Yeah, they're so averse to the word No that they would rather let men into women's bathrooms than say No.
The way I think of it is this:
Men have more variance -- your biggest losers and your biggest winners will all be men. Women tend to clump in the middle, neither exceptionally good nor bad.
This tends to make women shitty leaders. I've seen this borne out across cultures, too, so it's not part of the unique American ennui going around. It doesn't mean that women can't be leaders (Margaret Thatcher, like her or hate her, was definitely a leader), it just means that trying to fulfill leadership quotas or pointing to a 50/50 split is a bad thing.
That's not exactly true. I own a Switch -- I don't play it a ton but I like it for traveling or on the rare day off I get to do basically nothing. But I like to think I'm pretty damn far from an NPC.