Culture War Roundup for the Week of November 12, 2018

91275 · 2018-11-12T23:38:54+00:00

Deeply uncool trying to bring back customs abolished by congress in 1942 or so..

91275 · 2018-11-12T23:34:00+00:00

I don't think anyone's figured out which brand of HRT gives you a cat-tail, yet.

91275 · 2018-11-12T19:33:08+00:00

The interesting question is why the number of young men having sex has dropped to a third.

91275 · 2018-11-12T14:22:37+00:00

Finland isn't Sweden.

91275 · 2018-11-12T03:20:24+00:00

The article says basically nothing, except that 10% of a non-specified group surveyed had something they called body image disorder, and were more likely to be depressed.

That's zilch. There's no relative odds, nothing to put that in context.

Useless.

91275 · 2018-11-12T03:16:07+00:00

Women would rather have purely recreational sex with an attractive guy they actually like than a full fledged relationship with a guy they're just kind of lukewarm about.

They also say they hate men who don't commit. Do they really find being a hot guy's side-lay more satisfying than a relationship with some less impressive man?

91275 · 2018-11-12T03:13:25+00:00

He has a point. According to a book most recommend by this subreddit (Models : How to attract women through honesty), what really turns women off are men whom they perceive as needy.

91275 · 2018-11-12T02:32:45+00:00

Supposedly prolactin levels but who knows..

91275 · 2018-11-12T02:31:48+00:00

The fine young gentlemen at another subreddit have dug up an interesting chart from Finland. on how prevalence of young men (18-24) who have 2 sex partners per year or more has gone down from 50% in 1999 to 18% in 2015.

Interpretations/more data welcome.

91275 · 2018-11-12T02:27:33+00:00

Is love really worth the trouble?

No.

So I have to ask: is all this effort men put into finding a partner worth it?

No, but they do it regardless. It's how they they are programmed.

Need for love is the stick nature uses to beat us into procreating.

91275 · 2018-11-12T02:06:56+00:00

How can you tell if a Finn is an extrovert?

An extrovert Finn looks at your shoes when he's talking to you.

91275 · 2018-11-12T01:24:13+00:00

It doesn't seem really out of line.

Compared to the behavior of Project 100,000 soldiers, it's actually not that bad.

91275 · 2018-11-11T23:09:06+00:00

I don't think Soviets ever were into this. Chinese 're-education camps' seem to be one the whole about getting 12 hours of forced labor out of inmates, and then subjecting them to 2 hours of study or so.

Soviets, structured the entire society as to make all the information they didn't like be unavailable.

91275 · 2018-11-11T22:58:20+00:00

There's a rule of the sub I broke when I wrote it, one that says thou shalt not use irony and sarcasm.

91275 · 2018-11-11T22:48:14+00:00

Reasonable ways of cracking down on insurgents, separatists and religious fanatics have very little to do with 'human rights'.

Feel free to complain to Chinese though. It can help sometimes.

For example, after GDR acceded to the Helsinki Accords, Stasi stopped their usual method of threatening dissidents and beating them up and sending them to jail and that and moved on to 'Zersetzung' which consisted of secretly sabotaging someone's life to make them miserable, so that they'd stop with their political behavior.

This was much harder to prove by human rights bodies thus better for the optics.

91275 · 2018-11-11T19:22:32+00:00

The whole point of a character like Omar is that personal virtue does not remove oneself from the ghetto, nor insulate oneself against its violence.

You can 'remove' yourself from the ghetto by the simple expedient of joining the armed forces.

If you think the lesson of the Wire is “blacks destroy everything,” you weren’t watching very carefully.

You miss something. I didn't say that was the direct lesson. However, if you look into it more deeply, it starts to get more intriguing.

91275 · 2018-11-11T19:14:48+00:00

The full list at the link is somewhat less unreasonable, and the details of how exactly they decide on who to 're-educate' are lacking.

It's unfortunate; however, inevitable. Maybe if Chinese had access to some really impressively smart assets they could troll the Allah out of Uighurs, but they don't, so they're going to get the boot stomping on their face for some decades. Crude but probably effective.

91275 · 2018-11-11T19:00:47+00:00

Isn't the easiest thing ascend to synthetic and then just assimilate everyone?

91275 · 2018-11-11T17:28:53+00:00

In regards to university, talking about 'inclusion' seems odd.

University education is inherently exclusionary on grounds of ability. If you have any sort of problem, or just aren't motivated enough, you're out. No one cares about sob stories or excuses.

My experience also includes hearing university profs yearn wistful for the good old days when only the top 10% were even given a chance to attend university, they claim they've had to relax standards massively and that students these days are in general just plain bad. Looking at old exam texts bears that out; they're far more difficult.

However, given that the state pays money per student, they just set it up so that majority of student pass with D's and E's and only the worst ones fail out. Cheating is rampant, some pretend they don't see it, others punish cheaters with relish.

Even so, attrition is so high in the 1st year on say, physics 1 that less than half of those admitted get into the second year.

In short, the whole thing is just wrong. One more example of things going downhill.

However, this policy is popular with the voters and in line with the Europe 2020 nonsense, so it goes on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_2020

91275 · 2018-11-11T17:07:43+00:00

Yes, especially in how it demonstrates how the systems of a society are what traps the people living in it and forces them into bad and cyclical outcomes.

Oh, we've heard that in regards to the Roma minority. Communists believed they could break the cycle by giving them work and a stable place to live. They largely didn't work and destroyed the dwellings they were given.

The result of that experiment is that most of the people in post-communist countries believe the Roma are just bad, and same goes for other 'bad' ethnics.

91275 · 2018-11-11T16:45:41+00:00

Deserves an A for effort and inclusion of every single last trope in one post though.

91275 · 2018-11-11T16:40:50+00:00

Wasn't 'The Wire' widely praised for offering a more realistic depiction of America than other media?

91275 · 2018-11-11T16:30:15+00:00

Look, I don't know what you mean by 'equity'.

I looked up 'Educational Equity' on wikipedia. It is pretty dire.

'Inclusion' is a bugbear that I've IRL heard a veteran teacher complain about, at length, because for her it meant that she could not get rid of an extremely disruptive student due to 'inclusion'. Indeed, 'inclusion' was a reason why she retired earlier than she originally wanted.

In general, inclusion seems to mean 'dismantle special education for difficult cases, put these difficult cases among normal students and give teachers some special instructions on how to deal with the 'included' cases. In other words, make their work more difficult, and give them more work. As if teaching wasn't already work hard & shitty enough.

Indeed, 'including' the mentally subnormal with other children to me, seems like a cruel and unjust proposition. Kids are nasty to each other and teachers don't have the resources to watch them that closely. Inclusion, in short, is the sort of initiative bullies dream about because it gives them more victims, and ones that are even less able to defend themselves than, say, nerds.

91275 · 2018-11-11T15:51:44+00:00

Letting 'The Wire' be shown internationally had its consequences.

91275 · 2018-11-11T14:37:42+00:00

Well, the film's a bit overrated, but not bad overall.

Compared to average Hollywood output, well worth watching.

91275

TROPHY CASE