(If your screen display colours are set to warm, this literally looks like shit. It's no illusion).

Congratulations on discovering a colour that expresses equally the notions of cancer and diarrhea while dressing its inherent abomination up as an innocuous neutrality. This is surely the colour of evil. I need a drink.

Will there be more flaming now? Psychological experiment in progress.

How intense is the pressure to be traditionally masculine? — csalisbury

Back in the bad old days when I had a real job, I taught some Russian students and noticed some fairly strong distinguishing characteristics, including masculinity, and also:

• Leadership skills and confidence high in both sexes
• Strong in-group preferences
• High levels of professed religiosity (religious symbols and so on. How that translated otherwise into behavior, hard to say).
• A very pronounced 'cool' factor among the males.
• Females very no-nonsense/direct.

If anything the Russian male students gave me the impression of being most like pre-60s American youth—Marlon Brando, The Wild One type era. They tended to stick to themselves and were all special handshakes and dark looks outside their circle unless they liked you in which case they could be very friendly. I got on well with two in particular who I taught and who went on to become President and Vice-president of the students' union (Putin and Medvedev, I called them after that :) ) so when I met them in the canteen, they would invite me to sit with them and then their buddies would automatically think I was in the in-group and do the whole cool thing with me (which was a little jarring because it was hard to leave teacher mode behind and I'm not sure I wanted to much as I was flattered by the treatment).

As it happened, one of those two was very homophobic, which was again jarring for me because he was also a very nice guy and I didn't find out he was an extreme homophobe until after I had formed that strong impression of him. I won't go on about that tangent except to say that after three years in a liberal British university environment, he got over it.



Sounds to me you had no obvious good choices and very little time to decide so you acted on impulse, which is unpredictable and resistant to analysis by nature. People have done a lot worse. I recall a movie, the plot of which involves a father who when with his family on a skiing holiday and faced with a sudden avalanche runs away without ensuring their safety. They all survive but then have to deal with his reaction. I'd rather be mythologized as a hero than face the prospect of being seen as a coward for the rest of my life. Having said all that, it's got to be an extremely unsettling thought that your reaction could have had even more negative consequences than it did. Give it some time to process.

If anyone is copy-pasting stuff, that would be deleted, but please make it clear by PM and let the discussion go on impeded. We're doing our best to be impartial is all.

What do you mean by 'pre-recorded'?

Per usual, you're maximally obtuse. — frank

Damn, and this is me in a good mood. :)

From a mod point of view, it's just a political debate and we don't have any official dog in the fight. If you think anyone is guilty of trolling though, please make a case to us by PM rather than in the discussion. Thanks.

Noted. But there might as well be someone to give the 'official' line here. Engage or not to the extent you think it's worthwhile.

:up:

Agreed. Anyway, excuse my interjection and please carry on.

Just in case anyone thinks I'm dismissing @NOS4A2's propaganda arguments completely, he could actually be right as the following graphic demonstrates:

Interesting debate. So, maybe the duck-shaped thing walking and quacking like a duck was really just a pineapple.

:lol:

A few weeks ago my wife, a Muscovite, and I drove down a country road near Vladimir, trying to get to the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin on the Nerl River, but we never made it because the car got stuck in the mud on a slope at the edge of a steep drop. Long story short, while I was trying to push the car from behind it rolled back and pinned me against a telegraph pole. I couldn't breathe and I began seeing stars, and I thought I was going to die, but I managed to squeeze out with just a broken hand and three broken ribs — jamalrob

Fucking hell. Coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago my car also got stuck going up a country road on a steep slope. There was only me so I couldn't push it myself but five minutes later a burly local pulled up beside me and asked if I wanted a hand. Luckily, I didn't end up nearly killing him and he got me on solid ground. See, that's how you do a happy ending. Try harder next time!

My current read: https://www.plutobooks.com/9781783713004/the-mythology-of-work/

You'd like it, I think. Lots of references to Deleuze in there. :cheer:

Like many, I've been ignorantly dismissing it for years. — jamalrob

Me too. Probably been listening to too much Zizek.

Funny. I grabbed that from the library a week or two ago. Yes, well-written and I initially liked it but then I felt the author stopped believing himself and it all became a bit forced and naively implausible for me. He's better when he's talking about micro-personal stuff than trying to deal with politics imo. Oh, and the main protagonist is a wanker. Hard to stay with him. So, I dumped it.

Ordering popcorn now.

No, it's a legal fact. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth arguing over.

1968, eh? A bit too much autonomy maybe. There is this, for example:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/24/jonhenley

"Now an MEP for the French Green party, Mr Cohn-Bendit has been severely embarrassed by the resurfacing of an article he published in 1975 about the "erotic" nature of his contacts with children at an alternative kindergarten in Frankfurt, where he lived and worked after being kicked out of France for his part in May 68.

"Certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me," he wrote. "I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances ... But when they insisted on it, I then caressed them."

Cohn-Bendit denies the above actually happened. Nevertheless, he did write that it did.

Hadn't read that discussion yet. Thanks for the heads up. :up:

It's a bit more complicated than that. You haven't provided any evidence that they are 'fine' in Germany or that being 'fine' in Germany translates to being 'fine' everywhere else or even what 'fine' is in measurable terms and how we get from 'fine' to 'not fine' (e.g. are things not 'fine' as they stand in the UK? Why not?). It's as if you're claiming that any social policy that doesn't cause such obvious harm that it would be general knowledge to a foreigner must be a good idea and must be a good idea universally.

Further, to un's point: Why 14 and not 13? Why 13 and not 12? Is it that you share the same concerns as others but simply make different presumptions about the level of maturity of children of a certain age? If that's the case, shouldn't figuring the ideal level out and how generalizable it is cross-culturally be the focus re international comparisons? Anyhow, to clarify, where would you set the age of consent and why?

The mythology of work: how capitalism persists despite itself—Peter Fleming

Problematizes the concept and practice of work especially in the context of its most recent neoliberal incarnation. Very good so far.

It's theoretically possible given the one-sided time qualification "in her prime", but regardless of logical considerations, it's of course, empirically, nonsense.

The most straightforward way to decide this is to ask which the greater social evil is, that adolescents and those who would have sex with them for whatever reason be denied those opportunities, or that children, who are less mature and more prone to being manipulated— especially by adults—be unprotected from potentially damaging early sexual experiences.

I don't see any compelling reason why the former evil should outweigh the latter. First do no harm and so on.

(i.e I agree with @Hanover and @unenlightened).

@alcontali The "cock carousel" is a sexist and misogynist meme. Note that sexists aren't welcome here and will be banned.

"If you’ve spent any time at all observing misogynists online, you are no doubt familiar with the concept of the “cock carousel” — a vaguely poetic way of referring to the allegedly vast number of men that the average woman is said to have sex with in her “prime,” from the moment she first starts having sex in her teens up until she “hits the wall” somewhere between age 25 and 30, immediately rendering her too old and ugly to be appealing to most men. (Allegedly.)

Since the myth of the cock carousel is such a key component of the ideology of the so-called manosphere, I thought I’d devote a post to tearing it down completely."

http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2018/11/13/why-the-cock-carousel-is-bullshit-according-to-science/

Can everyone please respect the subject of the OP and ignore or report all off-topic posts? Thanks.

:lol:

I'm not saying you have. I'm asking for more detail. I'm curious as to what it is about liberalism that appeals to you. We can start with this. Here are the supreme court judges ranked from most liberal to most conservative:

Sonia Sotomayor (-0.521)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (-0.518)
Elena Kagan (-0.302)
Stephen Breyer (-0.280)
John Roberts (0.089)
Samuel Alito (0.317)
Neil Gorsuch (0.486)
Brett Kavanaugh (0.693)
Clarence Thomas (0.725)

Can you explain to me why you support Sotomayor and Ginsburg, for example, more than Kavanaugh and Thomas? What aspects of their liberalism do you particularly identify with?

https://www.axios.com/supreme-court-justices-ideology-52ed3cad-fcff-4467-a336-8bec2e6e36d4.html

Alright, you tell me what the liberal policy agenda is. Bullet point the priorities you think American liberals would generally get behind and tell me who the most liberal supreme court judges are and why you support them.

Well, he's filled all those judicial positions with liberal judges, taken a humane approach to the border, strengthened LGBTQ rights legislation, got behind the Paris Climate change agreement, and put higher taxes on the rich to fund spending on welfare programs and education.

What liberal wouldn't love him?

This discussion was merged into Ignore list browser extension

Wonderful news.

That's what I happened to see. Anyhow, glad to hear he was such a popular guy.

There's a 'probable' in probable cause.

"A common definition is "a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent and cautious person's belief that certain facts are probably true"."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_cause

That means you don't have to have committed a crime to be arrested. All that is necessary is that a law enforcement official has a reasonable belief that you have.

If you don't understand this, we could be forgiven for assuming you have a serious comprehension disability or are trolling. Please help us not to think that.

Only because we're run by the Clintons—as if you didn't know, Bill. :wink:

Again, the Clinton DNC is a front for the House of Islam: one required access to the "underground market" via Clinton, which is where you will find all of your human trafficking, pedophilia etc. and it leads back to the House of Islam. — A Gnostic Agnostic

>Banned.

The idea that nothing ever happens because of speech acts has been a repeated theme in several discussions involving Terrapin Station recently. I'm surprised you missed it. I hope, unlike him, you'll eventually see the futility in the argument and qualify it into a more sensible position.

But yes, feel free to keep debating this nonsense all over the site in multiple discussions until one of us mods has had enough and deletes the whole lot.