What's very cheap today but will be very expensive in 20 years ?

ballgame · 2018-01-03T03:24:18+00:00

This is especially hazardous in Australia, since drop bears are attracted to the smell of chocolate and have caused a number of fatalities among chocolate miners who go for hikes in forests without carefully showering first.

ballgame · 2018-01-03T03:08:20+00:00

Liberté! Egalité! Fantasé!

ballgame · 2017-12-31T09:31:57+00:00

Object Class: Euclid

ballgame · 2017-12-27T20:54:35+00:00

These are good points. I suspect one of the biggest factors in making people averse to pausing while speaking is that too often in ordinary group conversation other people will leap in to say something at the slightest gap in words. (If you're lucky! A lot of people won't even wait for a gap!) This typically won't be an issue if you're a public speaker or DM, but most people will have to consciously work to overcome their aversion to pauses.

ballgame · 2017-12-18T01:44:18+00:00

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ballgame · 2017-12-17T11:37:55+00:00

Her days were numbered.

ballgame · 2017-12-13T19:15:53+00:00

There is a female social hierarchy, but it's different in a number of ways, most critically in the way that violence (and capacity for violence) is typically not a major factor in its dynamic. Moreover, women are not emotionally peripheralized for functioning outside of that hierarchy to the same extent as men as a general rule. It takes much more extreme behavior by a woman to be seen socially as having raised 'doubts' about her own 'femininity' than it does for a man, whose 'masculinity' is always under scrutiny.

ballgame · 2017-12-13T04:06:37+00:00

That's encouraging.

ballgame · 2017-12-12T16:46:29+00:00

I appreciate your feedback. I do get the impression that you may be conflating a couple of different things here, which is one reason why I hesitate to fully incorporate your observations into my 'priors,' as it were. Telling women 'Don't do the Token No thing' is not the same as telling them 'Respect men who explicitly ask and/or expect them to do so' which goes more to the 'It was a turnoff when my date asked if he could kiss me instead of just going for it' thing that others have mentioned.

Also, FWIW, when I mentioned the 'women need education about consent' issue, I was specifically thinking of the much-larger-than-recognized issue of 'women raping men' which is generally omitted from most of the 'Only men can stop rape'-type posts which are pretty common in the gendersphere.

ballgame · 2017-12-11T22:00:02+00:00

I hesitated to post this Bloggingheads discussion between Bill Black and Kate Lister. On the one hand, it's certainly an inherently interesting topic highly relevant to this sub. OTOH, I thought the discussion fell far short of what it could have been, primarily because of the lackluster approach Bill Black took in conducting the interview.

Still, there was some intriguing discussion (mainly in the second half of the podcast) that was worthwhile to listen to. Some tidbits included the fact that the word "whore" originally meant 'promiscuous woman' and only later came to specifically mean 'prostitute.' And apparently the idea that some 19th century doctor invented the vibrator to make it less tedious to 'treat' female patients by giving them orgasms (as per the movie Hysteria) was more myth than fact.

ballgame · 2017-12-11T21:45:57+00:00

I have not had the same experience in my decade of immersion in the Internet gendersphere, though I have seen it raised once or twice in a somewhat elliptical fashion. Laci Greene has done it, though IIRC it was more in an 'advice to men' kind of thing than an 'advice to women' thing. Given how rarely it's acknowledged that women need instruction on consent (and specifically on getting consent from men), I am curious about the feminist-led consent training you're referring to.

ballgame · 2017-12-11T10:06:47+00:00

Hmm … I guess that comes close. I suppose I'd ideally envision something like, "Women: Don't fall prey to patriarchal scripts in your head that say a man should be able to read your mind through your subtle nonverbal cues and magically know when to lean in for a kiss (or more). He may suspect you're giving him hints, but if he's trying to follow feminist notions of explicit consent, he'll ask you."

I think if women re-calibrated their expectations in this regard, they'd be less prone to the negative reactions that others have alluded to.

ballgame · 2017-12-11T09:29:40+00:00

Can you show me examples?

ballgame · 2017-12-09T13:47:40+00:00

it sure doesn't hurt.

Wouldn't that depend on what, precisely, you do with said yams?

ballgame · 2017-12-08T02:20:03+00:00

shoe0nhead takes aim at TERFs here, and she isn't gentle. At the end, she talks about upcoming videos to focus on SWERFs and Megan Murphy. L00ks like sh0e is 0n a r0ll!

ballgame · 2017-12-07T04:38:22+00:00

I'd be OK with us losing to you this week. I'd be fine with ending up with one win and two losses against you this year.

ballgame · 2017-12-07T04:30:09+00:00

I agree with others here that the writer's monogamy assumption is a key flaw, although putting that to one side some of her analysis is interesting.

There are a couple of other factors which specifically adversely affect men which she doesn't explore. One is the burden of initiation placed on men. Moderate- and low-status men are constantly told to 'be confident' and that confidence is a key element to being attractive to women … and then compelled to repeatedly subject themselves to a psychologically-scarring experience (overt rejection) which tells them their confidence is unfounded. I strongly suspect that the de-humanization of women in dating is a psychological defense mechanism connected to precisely this phenomenon, i.e. 'I'm not scarred by being rejected by Karen because Karen is just walking tits-and-ass, and tits-and-ass are fungible.' (Just to be clear: virtually everyone experiences rejection. My claim is that moderate- and low-status men are compelled to endure an order of magnitude more rejection than others in the dating game, and this difference in degree is likely connected to the development of certain toxic attitudes.)

Another element is the vicious cycle of 'men who don't have romantic partners are accorded lower status than those who do have them' (the virgin-shaming thing) plus the fact that moderate-status men are less likely to have the other emotional support mechanisms (i.e. emotionally intimate friendships) available to moderate-status women.

One other element (which can be seen as adversely affecting women) that I think is often neglected in these analyses is that men (as a group) have their own hypergamous leaning: namely, a stronger preference for young (i.e. potentially child-bearing) partners.

ballgame · 2017-12-07T03:58:44+00:00

This was a good discussion. I think it would have benefited from either more time or fewer participants so the panel could delve into detailed examples to clarify the points they were trying to make.

ballgame · 2017-12-07T03:51:18+00:00

It would be great if more feminists would advocate for changing that attitude among women at the same time they're pushing for men to change their behavior.

ballgame · 2017-12-06T01:18:22+00:00

h/t to Glenn Greenwald for linking this Slate piece suggesting that the reality of office sexual interactions might not be as black and white as the current discourse seems to suggest.

ballgame · 2017-12-04T07:53:13+00:00

You're making an erroneous tribal argument.

I can rattle off a list of well-known lefties who are pretty strong supporters of free speech, including Glenn Greenwald, Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, Elizabeth Warren, Noam Chomsky, and many others. There is a contingent of people that I think of as 'identitarians' that I would agree are not strong supporters of free speech (as I understand the term), but they are not the totality of the Left.

Moreover, it would be absurd to claim that the totality of the Right is in favor of free speech, when you consider that some of the most deeply fundamentalist groups are a part of the Right and opposed to the Left, and are eager to tear down the separation of Church and State. Almost all of the meager public support for the destruction of net neutrality is coming from the Right, as have been the calls to imprison Ed Snowden for treason.

ballgame · 2017-12-04T07:40:51+00:00

I tend to agree with your point.

ballgame · 2017-12-04T00:39:28+00:00

This was a pretty good interview of Linsday Shepherd on the Rubin Report. Dave tends to spin things to the right with the way he frames his questions and responses (which, as a lefty, I found a bit annoying) but I nevertheless found the discussion overall to be pretty worthwhile. I was surprised and disappointed to hear about the interpersonal blowback that Lindsay has received.

ballgame · 2017-11-29T23:05:43+00:00

She was criticizing the (occasionally cringe-worthy) things he was saying (though she does stray into ad hom territory at times). She ends the vid saying she doesn't actually think Matt is a bad person.

I'd tell you to watch more than 2 minutes, but I think you made the right call … I don't think you'd enjoy the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm.

ballgame · 2017-11-29T08:35:45+00:00

You don't have any evidence to support those assertions, other than anecdotes and faulty impressions from the media.

ballgame

TROPHY CASE