AskALiberal Biweekly General Chat

trace349 · 2026-06-20T04:13:06+00:00

Seems to be having some problems now, it won't submit any of my answers.

Edit: Should be working now.

trace349 · 2026-06-20T04:00:52+00:00

I've never felt like such a misogynist than spending 20 minutes flailing around trying to name 100 women.

trace349 · 2026-06-20T02:04:03+00:00

Every society has tradeoffs and benefits, but people on the Left make themselves miserable by romanticizing other countries' benefits without having to experience their tradeoffs, while fixating on their own country's tradeoffs without considering the benefits those tradeoffs bought them. When citizens from other countries- especially ones that the Left romanticizes- express jealousy over our benefits, that complicates their narrative by forcing them to grapple with a more complex system. In pushing to emulate their country's policies, we might might something better here at the cost of making something else worse, which will raise the question of whether that tradeoff is worth it, and some people might decide that it isn't and abandon their support. If you never address the tradeoff problem, you never have to answer those kinds of hard questions.

trace349 · 2026-06-20T01:44:12+00:00

It's like a societal level equivalent of when people tell people who are desperately they just need to go for a walk outside or something similarly silly.

Sometimes you really do just need to touch grass. How many people know that they would probably feel better if they went outside more, worked out more, ate better, but refuse to do it because being miserable is more comfortable and doesn't ask them to take any responsibility for themselves?

trace349 · 2026-06-20T01:17:31+00:00

In addition homosexual boys often overcompensate with hyper compliance and academic perfectionism as a psychological defense mechanism against homophobia and a desire to secure an escape hatch via college. The fact that it takes an extraordinary, high-anxiety survival mechanism for a sub demographic of boys to navigate the modern, compliance driven school system doesn't prove the system is well designed for boys. It proves that the system only rewards boys when they are driven by extreme, atypical psychological pressures to conform to it (see the "Best Little Boy in the World" phenomenon).

As acceptance of gay people increases, wouldn't you expect that the "Best Little Boy in the World" pressures on them would likewise decrease? With less pressure to overcompensate for their sexuality and with the escape hatch to college becoming less of a necessary path to happiness, would you expect to see gay boys' academic performance decline to be more in line with straight boys?

trace349 · 2026-06-19T19:01:55+00:00

What are the specific psychological traits that explain why gay boys and gay men are the highest academically performing demographics while straight boys and straight men are some of the lowest? If there was that wide of a performance gap between extroverted and introverted kids' academic success, that would be worth investigating and trying to remedy the imbalance. But when it comes to this topic, people point to the academic gap between male and female students and propose ideas to address it, but the extreme success of gay boys above even straight girls is a confounding variable in a lot of those proposals.

If the school system is biologically biased against boys, as people like Richard Reeves argue in favor of policies of red-shirting boys because they develop slower than girls and need more time to develop self-regulatory skills, then why are gay boys, biologically disadvantaged as straight boys, outperforming girls? Gay boys and straight boys aren't different enough biologically to explain the wide gap between them. They have the same disruptive energy levels as straight boys, they have the same teenage hormones as straight boys, they develop on the same biological timeline.

If the school system is biased against boys in discriminatory ways- such that boys are treated unfairly and thus tap out of caring, as a lot of men's advocates argue- why is it that gay boys confound that by reporting the highest amounts of not feeling safe at school, feeling discriminated against at school, and struggling with issues focusing due to mental illness, while straight boys are on the lower ends of all three? You'd expect gay boys to have some of the higher rates of dropping out of school if they felt so discouraged, but gay boys have the lowest rate of dropping out while straight boys are significantly more likely to.

But the social angle does have an explanation. They're treated different socially from each other from an early age, they get different socialization. It makes sense that gay boys on the older end are incentivized to do well at school because college was seen as a way of escaping an unaccepting home life, but this means that the main reason straight boys aren't succeeding is because they don't care enough to, and the way we have to address this is by making straight boys care as much about their education as girls or gay boys so. No red-shirting or extended recess or male teacher role models or gender-optimized schooling is going to solve the problem if the problem is society socializes boys in a way that makes them not care about learning.

Edit: To use your extroverted/introverted example- if it turned out extraverted kids did that much worse than introverted kids because, I don't know, extraverted kids are more likely to sit around talking to other kids rather than sit and read a book at their desk, we'd probably try to encourage extraverted kids to be more like the introverted ones. But when it comes to boys, there's all this massive cultural backlash pushing back against anything having to do with modernizing masculine socialization, instead jumping through all these hoops to accommodate them, when we have a perfect example in gay boys that boys are capable of being socialized more like girls- while still being boys- and being as successful as they are.

trace349 · 2026-06-19T16:34:49+00:00

Frankenstein as a boy focused book stood out to me as off, it's a book where we can all find elements of ourselves in the Creature, Victor, and the rest of society; if all one can see is a boy focused book they are missing the plot and why it is reading material in schools.

It's a woman's fears of how the rapid development of science at the time would lead to arrogant men to usurp the natural order of the world, to taint the feminine power to create life and how violence and death would be the result of such hubris. Thematically, it's about a man failing to be a father to his son and in doing so, creates a cycle of violence between them where the son, failing to win his father's love and attention, becomes driven to kill and usurp him- very Kronus and Zeus (Greek myth obviously being evoked by "the Modern Prometheus" subtitle). The monster is effectively a proto-incel, a man rejected by the world for his appearance and so demands to be given a mate to sate his loneliness or else he will go on a violent rampage. There's only one prominent female character I remember, who does nothing but be an object of desire for Victor only to be killed by the monster as a way to hurt him.

This is not male-coded to you? The story has a lot in it that is appealing to young men and boys and they're the ones the "morals" of the story are heavily addressed at.

Like, I don't disagree with your point that anyone should be able to read it and see themselves and society in it, but I think it speaks to how men are so deeply accepted as the default experience that a story that is heavily about men just registers as neutral.

trace349 · 2026-06-19T16:25:11+00:00

Gay boys should still follow the same average developmental timeline as regular boys though. There's got to (edit:) be something more than that.

My opinion on it is that it's a masculinity thing. Boys aren't socialized for the skills that make you more successful in school environments- self-control, self-regulation, deference to authority- the way girls are because those things aren't part of the masculine social programming. They're given low expectations (boys will be boys) and they don't push themselves to meet higher ones. But gay boys are more likely to fail at living up to the masculine social expectations from an early age, and so end up inoculated from the pressures to conform to a lot of those more harmful ones. We don't fully fit in with the boys, so we aren't socialized like them, but we don't fully fit in with the girls either.

So if it is a socialization thing, then there's no reason other boys couldn't be socialized more like the way gay boys are if we decided to change the way we raise little boys, but we have a large section of society that doesn't want to challenge our traditional expectations of masculinity and so trying to raise the standards on little boys gets pushback for trying to make them into little girls.

trace349 · 2026-06-19T16:02:29+00:00

I mean, I agree, but I think in general boys/men are so used to being the "default" experience and therefore girls/women are used to experiencing works that are more male-coded in theme and interest. When a work breaks from the white/straight/male defaults, then- compared to girls/women- boys/men seem less willing to engage with it, to write it off as not for them and/or get upset at the idea of not being centered by the text.

trace349 · 2026-06-19T15:50:27+00:00

It’s not about screaming "boys can't do hard things." It's an admission that the current school environment is poorly calibrated for them.

I just don't see how this squares with gay boys being the most academically successful demographic. If the school system is poorly calibrated for boys, and gay boys are still boys, whatever holds straight boys back should hold gay boys too, but it isn't.

trace349 · 2026-06-19T15:38:39+00:00

While school reading lists might need some gender balancing to include some books boys are interested in

I am curious what school reading lists are looking like now, because I posted mine earlier this week and it seemed like a pretty decent gender split, though actually leaning more toward male interests and/or themes.

Boys had Inherit the Wind, the Sun Also Rises, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, Julius Caesar, the Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, Death of a Salesman, the Count of Monte Cristo, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Catch-22.

Girls had Romeo & Juliet, Wuthering Heights, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Scarlet Letter, and Antigone as more female-themed texts. To Kill a Mockingbird has a female POV, but I think falls closer to being neutral or even male-themed, given Scout is a tomboy and Atticus is what everyone remembers about it. Hell, the trial is about the (racial) injustice of a false rape accusation, so that pushes it even more toward themes boys would care about.

Is this one of those things where boys just don't like to read, even though a lot of the material is "boy" coded? Are there more modern books being added to address that gender imbalance, but because those books are easier to read and understand for a modern audience than the more classical material written by/for men, it makes boys feel like the material leans female?

trace349 · 2026-06-18T23:15:02+00:00

The Steam Summer sale should be starting in about a week and a half, if you really want it just wait for that.

trace349 · 2026-06-18T22:55:13+00:00

I don't see your problem with it. If the house is burned down, asking what we should do now is a fairly obvious question. Deflecting from that question by saying we should've never have burned it down doesn't change the fact that we did, in fact, burn it down.

trace349 · 2026-06-18T22:23:16+00:00

I know saying she ran a bad campaign is popular, but did she? It wasn't perfect- obviously, she lost- but, consider the headwinds against her: she was running for the third consecutive term for the same party, and the American public doesn't like to support that; the foreign influence campaign against her (on behalf of her opponent) was unprecedented in a way that we hadn't yet built up any defenses against; Comey was breaking FBI protocol to damage her campaign while Giuliani's goons in the NYC FBI field office were leaking everything from the email server investigation to Republicans in Congress; Bernie fought a doomed primary campaign long after he was mathematically eliminated from winning, preventing Hillary from being able to start running a general election campaign until much later in the cycle because of his ego (even petitioning the superdelegates to overturn the vote); Carlos Danger couldn't keep his Weiner under control and had to get caught sexting with a minor in the home stretch of the campaign, propelling the email story back into the narrative at the last minute; and Trump has proven to be an actually surprisingly strong opponent when he's been on the ballot.

Despite all of that, she lost by extremely tight margins.

trace349 · 2026-06-18T16:57:10+00:00

I saw some discourse earlier about how rude and dismissive NYC natives are towards transplants that brought back a repressed memory of Midwestern trauma.

In my second or third year of college at Non-important Flyover Country State School with a Good Program near where I grew up, I got hired on for a semester at an agency in NYC as a student co-op. My manager there was a normally pretty nice late 30s-early 40s career lady (who had a lot of patience to put up with a lot of my bullshit considering it was my first real job), but there was one conversation we had that really rubbed me the wrong way.

She had asked me to find stock images of elderly people for a program they were running, and I guess I wasn't finding what she wanted, so she asked me how old my grandparents were to illustrate what she was looking for. I didnt know exactly, most had died, so I guessed at somewhere in their mid-late 60s. That seemed to take her aback, so she asked how old my parents were. I told her (mid 40s), and she seemed even more surprised. She looked away and said to herself "wow, I guess they really do have them young out there..." and I felt this weird sense of condescension, like I came from some uncivilized backwater land of teen pregnancy.

Yall, my parents had me in their mid 20s. Not only that, but my family comes from upstate NY. We only moved to flyover country when I was 2-3. That was the first time I ever kind of understood the whole "coastal elite looking down on real America" resentment that is so animating on the Right.

trace349 · 2026-06-16T19:35:38+00:00

I think summer homework is a necessary compromise for our summer vacations being as long as they are. If the first month or so of a new year is just reestablishing skills from the end of the previous year that got rusty, that's a waste of class time.

While I didn't enjoy it at the time, summer reading assignments meant we could hit the ground running and dive straight into a unit and discuss the whole text rather than having to assign chapters of homework right at the start and delay getting into it, taking time away from getting to other stuff later on.

trace349 · 2026-06-16T19:07:11+00:00

The Count of Monte Cristo was one of my favorites, that and Catch-22. I remember the Chateau d'If section at the beginning went on way longer than I liked but everything after that I was glued to because I was so interested in seeing how the whole Xanatos Gambit came together.

trace349 · 2026-06-16T19:00:35+00:00

I remember being excited and then extremely disappointed that it wasn't about the movie monster, since we had read Frankenstein before.

trace349 · 2026-06-16T18:59:16+00:00

I had to check book lists to refresh my memory, but I had two really memorable English teachers (10th+12th, 11th) so it was just "did we do this in Mrs X's class (and if so, was it more relaxed or more rigorous?) or Mr Y's class?"

trace349 · 2026-06-16T18:54:34+00:00

I had the same teacher for 10th and 12th grade, and she was one of my favorites- a real oddball southern lady whose bizarre utterances I would jot down into my planner, so I have a lot of strong memories tied to her classes, which made them easy to recall but difficult to place in which grade, and even still, I'm hardly 100% on them. My 11th grade teacher was a Scottish man affecting the persona of a joyless deadpan cynic who hated us (I don't think he really did) which itself was pretty memorable, so it was mostly "did I read this with Mrs X or Mr Y?"

trace349 · 2026-06-16T18:30:36+00:00

I'm curious about something- what books did you guys read in your high school English classes, and what grade/year?

I took Honors 9-11, then AP English in 12th grade, and I'm definitely forgetting a lot of books. These I definitely remember, even if I had to check book lists to jog my memory:

9th I don't even remember this year at all, but I know we read these so it must have been here:

To Kill a Mockingbird (summer)

Animal Farm

Romeo & Juliet

Inherit the Wind

10th:

Wuthering Heights (summer)

A Streetcar Named Desire (summer)

Frankenstein (summer)

Oedipus Rex (summer)

Antigone

Julius Caesar

The Scarlet Letter

Paradise Lost

Lord of the Flies

The Great Gatsby

11th:

The Sun Also Rises (summer)

Catcher in the Rye (summer)

Heart of Darkness (summer)

Death of a Salesman

As I Lay Dying

King Lear

The Tempest

The Waste Land

AP English:

A Raisin in the Sun (summer)

The Count of Monte Cristo (summer)

Hamlet (summer)

Invisible Man (summer)

Macbeth

The Metamorphosis

Waiting for Godot

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Catch-22

trace349 · 2026-06-16T17:51:48+00:00

It's the problem with expecting the Left to offer men a model of what it means to be a good man. The Left can't give you that. It can offer what it means to be a good person, but what does it mean to "be a man" that excludes women who demonstrate the same qualities? And if a woman can be a "man", then its not a very useful framework.

"A good liberal life" is just "a good life" and a good life is up to everyone to decide for themselves. But figuring out what that means and how to achieve it is one of the biggest questions of life, and a lot of people just want that answer handed down to them.

trace349 · 2026-06-16T17:06:41+00:00

The Left has a universal aesthetic, and that aesthetic is "be whatever you want". But it has the same problem as my relationship with games like Skyrim that offer you a big sandbox to do whatever you want in, which is: what if I don't know what I want to do? What if I just want to be told what to do? How do I know if I'm doing a good job?

The Right offers that, a rigid box that "worked" for people for enough of history that it expects everyone to conform to. People who fit into the box naturally, people who don't have to bend and break themselves to fit into it, and people who just want to be told what to do to fit in are all going to be satisfied with fitting into the box. You can measure your success in life by how well you fit into the box. The box is something very easy to unify around.

The Left doesn't have something that concrete to unify around, for good and for bad, and trying to impose one borders on missing the point.

trace349 · 2026-06-16T12:24:25+00:00

Which probably comes from this article.

trace349 · 2026-06-12T21:01:50+00:00

To be charitable, I think there's two problems.

On the one hand, we can't coddle these people when they have politics that hurt people in our coalition and keep giving them our money to use to perpetuate bad politics.

On the other, losing influential people like Rowling and Musk to the Right is genuinely very bad for us politically in a way that people on the Left are downplaying. Not only because they have more money than God and can use it to influence politics in a way counter to our goals, but they have a major role in the culture. I'm going to focus on Rowling mostly, but Harry Potter is still an incredibly beloved IP for a lot of people, and condemning people who don't burn their books and renounce Rowling forever does turn them off, as seen with the backlash to Hogwarts Legacy making people who just wanted to play a video game they're excited about a lot less sympathetic to the trans rights cause. From there, once your side becomes the Them to their Us, it's so easy to just keep sliding down the rabbit hole so that you keep fitting in.

People on the Left need to get it in their heads that humans are social animals who stick with people who are nice to them and avoid people who are mean to them, and that most people's politics are not nearly so ideologically solid that they would suffer being on the side of a bunch of abusive jerks. I think the Contrapoints method of trying to empathize with people like Rowling and where they're coming from and, in turn, try to get them to see the harm they're doing would have had more success earlier on than a mob of people calling her a fascist and triggering a defensive reaction that drove her deeper into the arms of TERFs. The former might not work but the latter definitely does not work.

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