The shit of the 21st century is demotivating me to do... pretty much anything

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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  1. Jefferson hated the newspapers because of the way they treated him. The poor company that bought the company that invented asbestos spent decades settling lawsuits
  2. Lincoln is a popular president. More importantly he had a lot of support But what oppertunities do leaders have now?
  3. A majority of people have always been stupid.
  4. If women seem overly critical, it’s because they want to be heard . If people are reactionary it’s because they feel threatened.
  5. What’s the next big thing in tech? It’s been at least ten years since I’ve heard of wetware. But for all we know the aurthor of that article was being overly optemistic.

Frankly if there’s one real problem it’s the internet. It allows trolls and critics to go wild.

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I once said to my therapist (I’m no longer in therapy), who was pretty positive, almost naively so, “I don’t think even 25% of people are ‘relationship material’”–and he agreed with me instantly!

There just aren’t enough good people to go around and form good relationships, and of course, the good people can’t always pair up with other good people. Even if two good people form a relationship, they are not necessarily compatible.

People waking up to this truth will do nothing good for the fertility statistics, and it’s going to make (and I think is already making) it harder to form relationships in the first place.

That’s a good thing if we are avoiding more disasters, which I’m sure we are, but it’s going to lead to a lot more people being alone and unhappy too.

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Joking aside, the thing that immediately comes to mind is that, when you take the male-female dynamic out of the picture, then you have two equals who have to own that the quality of their sex life comes down to their particular relationship and not the male-female dynamic. E.g., if one gay woman in the couple wants to have more sex than the other, the other can’t say, “You men are pigs who just want sex all the time!”

I envy gay guys in this respect. I think it would all be so much easier to deal with.

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There’s no one manifesto, of course. I’m a feminist at odds with various other factions of feminism. What can you do? Listen to a bunch of different women and get the gist, I guess. And definitely look at the data.

I don’t think there’s good research indicating that men and women have differences in innate capabilities. My understanding is that there is some vague structural dimorphism in men and women’s brains, but it doesn’t really seem to impact capability. I am open to research indicating otherwise. I have no idea whether men are inherently better at chess than women, but I’m more concerned about whether there are capable women who want to play chess not getting the chance to do so because it is predominantly viewed as a men’s game. I’m not really threatened by the idea that men’s and women’s brains or even capabilities might, on the whole, be different, but I am threatened by the idea that outliers of any gender will not get their opportunities because of stereotypes and prejudice. Because we know that there ARE outliers, and to deny any of them the ability to be themselves is a travesty. I want to be seen for my whole self, not judged with regard to by capabilities on the basis of my gender.

This is true of all liberalism. We are the self-devouring ouroboros. We have no plan. All reaction, no substance. My opinion.

I think this is true, but I don’t think it has to be true. A part of my agency focuses on prevention education. Mind you this is about avoiding abusive relationships, but the point still stands. We train students who have been identified as leaders in their community to change the culture, and a lot of this involves empowering young women to recognize signs of an unhealthy relationship, to discover how they are impacted by cultural attitudes toward women, and to communicate effectively and the kinds of things that would make women more resilient in general to getting involved with someone who would treat them badly. On the flip side, the promising young men are educated about gender respect. These kids absolutely love this program. They build all sorts of original projects around it to change their school community. And because they are already recognized as leaders by their peers, they have an impact on school culture as a whole.

I think being good relationship material can be taught. The problem is we have half the country aggressively trying to discourage this kind of education because it might make boys feel bad about themselves. But I can tell you the boys don’t feel bad about themselves. They feel relieved, they get a chance to be heard, to consider the harm that is done not just to women but to them as well, and to actually do something about it.

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I think the fact that younger generations have access to better parenting, better health care, a more just world, better mental health care, exposure to more diversity, etc. mean they will be better off as a group of people.

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Maybe. I think they have some things going in their favor, but their mental health is not one of them. Kids that age have seen a precipitous rise not only in depression and anxiety, but suicidal behavior. The kids are not all right.

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Some things are better, some things are worse. You pointed out the better ones. I reply: social media and awareness about global warming.

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valid point.

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Skating on thin ice there, bud.

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Do you really want to get into sexist threadshitting? I’m quitting this thread.

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The real problem with the internet is that it allows people to spend the majority of their time in isolation working, entertaining themselves, engaging in commerce, dating, arguing and getting outraged over things they can’t control or have nothing to do with them. Yes, there is a convenience to it. But I think it causes people to become detached from the day to day of the real world. It also tends to “digitize” people, packaging them up into convenient simplified profiles and “personas” that can be tracked, analyzed, and marketed to.

And because everything on the internet is polished up and Photoshopped and expertly cultivated using the latest algorithms, it gives people an unrealistic expectation on how the world really is.

For example, I saw a TicTok video (are they called “videos” or just “TicToks” where a host is demonstrating how their dating criteria for an “ideal man” who is at least 6’ tall and earns over $100k a year is so statistically unrealistic that he had to drop the criteria to 5’10" and $75k. Even then it only represented something like 4% of the population.

Now I don’t know how true those stats are. But yeah, if you are constantly being told that only 6’ men earning six figures are “datable”, it’s probably going to be pretty demotivating when you go out into the real world and find out they are in short supply.

I would imagine that it’s the same with pretty much anything - careers, marriage, hobbies, wealth, homes, whatever. The internet allows you to compare yourself with the top 1% of 1% of everything on the planet.

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All good points. It also removes the social friction of talking to people (including potential dating partners) in real life. Young people are having less sex than previous generations, and I have seen that attributed to many potential factors both positive and negative, but it seems to me like internet behavior is comparable to the convenience of eating fast food. It’s not really giving you what you need, but it’s enough to get by until the next time you are hungry. So connecting online or sexting with a potential dating partner or whatever may not really be giving you what you need, but it’s enough to get by, and you don’t bother to go out and find the real thing. Because that is messy and awkward work.

And moving away from the dating subject, the internet also reduces the sense of community people have in their own locales. I know only one of my neighbors on a first-name basis and we rarely discuss anything of substance. I can sit in my own ideological silo and not have to deal with the messy reality that some people I get along with have some abhorrent or problematic opinions. Even the bonds between family members are wearing away, sometimes for good reason, but other times just because we are no longer interdependent as in previous generations.

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You seem to be relatively humorless kind of person.

I’m not being sexist, either. Women have been known to denigrate men in exactly the way I said. I was, in fact, citing a sexist trope that women have used against men.

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I’d be curious to hear more about this.

There is a lot, but it’s a contentious topic, so there is a lot of debunking of the research going on as well. My personal belief, based on the research and just, you know, living in the world, is that major differences between men and women lie in physical strength, differing interests, and differing micro-behaviors and micro-motivations. There are some differences in sheer capability, but they are small. (I find it more interesting that masculinity and femininity seem basically the same the world over. I lived in Japan, and women walk like women, laugh like women, talk like women, etc., as they do in the US. And the same goes for men. Even with cultural differences pertaining to all of these things [e.g., women in Japan often cover their mouths with their hand when they laugh a little bit in certain social situations; women in the US do not; this is clearly cultural], the basic patterns are instantly recognizable. Claiming that the Global Patriarchy or some such thing causes these similarities strains credulity.)

Also with respect to the “blank slate” belief, why is it that men are always the bullies dominating society and preventing women from fulfilling their potential, and not vice versa? I think the answer is that men are stronger, yes, but they are also simply the more dominating sex (more desirous of taking control and willing to put in work to achieve this). That is why, although they are typically controlled by men, societies have to work hard to control their own men.

BTW, the popularity of the show The Queen’s Gambit in recent years reignited the debate about whether were really less capable at chess than men–or are they just bullied by bad men into being less good? I saw arguments on both sides by women themselves. I think the obvious answer, although we may not like it, is that women are significantly less capable than men at the game and this kind of game (go, shogi, etc.). (I was in chess club in high school the 1980s, and girls did play, they were encouraged to play, they played in our tournaments, and I never saw any bullying, and I never even thought about it. I know some women have had different experiences, but chess would seem to be a very poor opportunity for bullying and exclusion in the first place. For example, you are more or less not allowed to say anything (e.g., you don’t say “check!” in a chess tournament, but you could ask for a draw) or try to psych your opponent out during the game.)

I agree, and I think one important element of gender equality is accepting that everyone deserves polite treatment and a chance at success even when they are not the gender typically associated with the role. For example, I did Pilates for years, and it was mostly women, but I was not treated as strange by the women in my classes, etc. I appreciated that. (I highly recommended it for both men and women, btw!)

Sort of… I think Obama tried…

But there are certainly exceptions. I did not have to seek out Greta Thunberg in order to hear about her, get a good idea of what her message is, and learn what she looks and sounds like. She was big enough in the media that it just happened. Where is the feminist Great Thunberg? What’s the message? Where are we headed, and where do we need to go?

I also like AOC and her ability to attract attention without it being about her. She’s a star.

Your mission sounds like a good one, and you raise a good question: What percentage of “bad relationship material” people can be reformed? I doubt it’s super-high–I think a lot of it comes down to character–but even converting 10% would make a big difference.

Yes, and white people feel bad about themselves (“critical race theory”), and gay people and trans people feel better about themselves (“don’t say gay”). Ugh, the right. Such dumbfucks these days.

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How I differ from some feminists? Oh, boy. This is gonna get personal.

I guess where I have found myself disagreeing the most with some feminists is with pejorative attitudes toward men. I have trouble with any sort of in-group out-group exclusion in general but I take it personally when men are attacked as a gender. As a macro social worker, I also have a hard time with the strategic failure of this take-no-prisoners attitude. Social change is a long-game that involves building coalitions of people who support your cause. Prevailing attitudes of some feminists toward men and the way in which they express their views undermines this strategic reality. So I get the urge to say, “Do you want to vent your spleen, or do you want to see results? You can’t have both.”* Because I work in this field (full disclosure: I am a grants manager. I do not work directly with clients) I see that the best activists are actually pretty inured to the ridiculous, sexist shit people say and are able to have meaningful conversations with those people by meeting them where they are. On the social action side, it takes meeting with police or prosecutors dozens of times to forge a relationship of trust and understanding before the change can actually take place. That’s what social change looks like on the ground. Developing human relationships with people who may not see things your way.

*I recognize that very assumption is up for debate. But I am like 75% confident in my opinion.

Most people just want to be understood. And they’re not going to listen until they believe you do understand them.

Next point: I don’t fully buy into the notion that women are rational to be afraid of men in general, and I say this as someone who has been victimized by more than one man. At no point did I then determine all men were potentially dangerous, so I find this response honestly kind of baffling. I generally assume people are fine until they give me reason to believe otherwise. That doesn’t mean I don’t get nerves walking down a dark street by myself, but that’s been culturally conditioned and I don’t believe it’s an accurate assessment of threat. I think it’s PTSD (which I have, and have had for 20 years.) I think many women experience symptoms of PTSD and use that to conclude they are rationally assigning danger to all men, but PTSD is not rational. It’s a conditioned response long after the danger is over. I think a lot of feminists get into the work before they’ve really processed their personal trauma. Which is not de facto wrong, but it seems to be that the overarching narrative of feminism at the moment is a trauma-driven rage response rather than a strategic attempt to create social change. This is the reason, I believe, that you see chaos in the movement.

This is a dangerous line of thinking, right? Because men are always calling women irrational. And it’s not irrational to be angry when something unjust happens to you. Sometimes I have intense feelings of rage toward my husband, particularly when he says he’s going to be somewhere/do something at a certain time and he doesn’t follow through. For whatever reason, this triggers profound feelings of abandonment from my childhood. I don’t voice my feelings or do anything about them, because I know they aren’t rational. One time after this feeling passed, I was telling my husband about it, and he said, “Your rage isn’t unjustified. It’s just misplaced in time.”

It took me years and years of therapy to get to this point. But I’m guessing it wouldn’t have taken that long if reactionary measures weren’t held up as this gold standard of the Correct Way to Deal With Your Trauma.

See also my favorite feminist essay.

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-collapsible-woman

I’m not questioning real emotions, nightmares, tears, and pain; they are the inviolable right of every human. How though, from this, have we come to portray the ideal “recovering” woman as someone who can’t go to the grocery store without having her “issues” “triggered”? Sure, there are days, sometimes months, in the life of anybody who has been violated when the need to protect oneself from the callousness of the outside world is absolute. We need, however, to hold up more than a skinless existence as an endpoint.

There’s a place for feminist rage. Rage often drives action. But lately I’m seeing it as the only model, and one that is held up as the ideal model for no good reason.

Which isn’t to say I don’t get angry sometimes – I get pissed!!! There is sometimes no bottom to my sheer indescribable rage. But I recognize that is a trauma response. It’s a response to feeling threatened, whether or not a threat actually exists.

Finally, I think most women who report sexual assault and sexual abuse are telling the truth. Most. I probably have more room for doubt than the average feminist, especially one in my field. That’s because I am intimately familiar with what it’s like to live with a woman who has untreated borderline personality disorder and delusional disorder, and how fervently my mother believes certain things about her own victimization that never happened. She revises her memories constantly to fit whatever her victim narrative of the week is. I don’t believe she is lying on purpose. She is genuinely distressed by these stories. She is just too mentally ill to grasp reality. And that has to be true of more women than just my mother. I want to also mention that my entire life was destroyed when I disclosed abuse that wasn’t believed when I was 17, so I know how painful it is not to be believed. That is an emotional wound I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Given that latter fact, I think we need to take every single allegation seriously. Every. Single. One. But there is a difference between taking an allegation seriously and inflicting consequences on the alleged perpetrator before the facts are out. I really empathize with men whose reputations are lost for things they didn’t actually do, probably because my reputation was lost for something I didn’t actually do – I didn’t lie. I understand the desire to see your perpetrator suffer, especially when you know legal justice is never gonna happen, but I can’t support angry social media posts as a tool for holding perpetrators accountable.

That is my personal take. It was necessary for me get there in order to heal, and every woman’s journey is different. Not everyone’s gonna agree. You gotta listen to all perspectives on this one.
There are a lot of highly intelligent and thoughtful women on this very board who take a different view. I want to be clear I’m not sharing this because I think my experience trumps some other woman’s, I’m just trying to explain that I came by these opinions as honestly as possible.

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Of course a lot of people were angry. How is that relevant to what I posted?

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No one in 1941 thought Pearl Harbor was the “end of America.”

I mean, it’s debatable how much people thought that on 9/11 either. In retrospect, I think that.

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Your whole post was interesting, but I’d like to focus on this, as I think it is the issue with “woke” politics today.

Note that I don’t buy into the right’s definitions of “wokeism,” “critical race theory,” “identity politics,” etc. They take a purposely ignorant and distorted look at these things in order to fan anger on their side and create propaganda with which to beat up the left.

That said, I have my own observations of what people on the left say and what they propose as solutions. And often, there are no solutions. There is no vision presented for how things turn out OK in the end. Often the vision simply seems to be, “Men/white people/big business/etc. sucks, and we’re just going to complain about it forever, since that’s our job.”

This is partly what my OP was about. Leaders present believable paths forward to a better future.

So in the case of feminism, a world in which men and women get along and we have rules to follow and we don’t have to get into the theory ever again is what needs to be presented.

Further, we need a set of rules that people can actually understand and follow. I have read things about microagressions, for example, and I wonder how the writers think the average person will be able to understand what they’re talking about and take pains to avoid all these tiny little things.

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We are never going to universally agree on what rules to follow, though. I’ve seen people on this board state that it’s never appropriate to talk to a strange woman in public. This is because women are harassed a lot, but I think that’s a pretty extreme way to handle it. I don’t want someone to feel they can’t or shouldn’t say hello to me. Or even strike up a conversation. Two women, two different preferences. What are you gonna do?

What I hope you (general you) would do is take away that sexual harassment is not appropriate and err on the side of caution when in doubt. But that is based on your subjective assessment. It’s not a prescriptive rule to follow. It requires the evaluation of context and using your judgement.

So I don’t think it’s realistic to expect some universal list of rules. But leadership doesn’t really require that, it just requires some action plan that most people agree is a good idea.

I agree with you generally that we have a strategic and leadership problem. I’ve felt that way for a long time.

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You aren’t from the baby boom generation and don’t have personal experience from those years. So I can understand your view of the time. The 50-70s were a time of great social and economic change-for a reason. Racism started to be confronted, but it is still a work in progress. McCarthyism destroyed many lives and launched many political careers. But it receded when it took on a target one of the most powerful bodies in the country-the US Army. The youth revolution of the sixties was a wonderful thing-for about 5 years. By 1968 it was definitely going downhill. Race riots were nightly events. Pollution didn’t start to be addressed until the early 70s and we will be cleaning up the environment for the next 30 years. And of course the war. Inflation started in the late sixties and didn’t recede for 20 years. The cold war was a constant fear-some of the worst moments were in the 1970s. Back in the 50s and early 60s people thought nuclear war would be terrible but mostly for the other guy. By the mid-60s no one was under any illusions. I lived through those years (born in 1952) and frankly there is a reason there is so much conservative pushback right now. The world has changed for the better more in the last 25 years than the last 100. They don’t like their loss of power. Economies have changed as you pointed out. Just like it did back in the 60s for coal miners and 70s for steelworkers. I certainly hope that the economy of tomorrow (literally if that were possible) will be better for workers than the current world of gig jobs and layoff notices. But it is still orders of magnitude better than living in a company town after the factory closes.