Captain Capitalism has a theory that people whose political inclinations tend to lean left are less physically attractive than those who lean more to the right. According to the Captain, looking physically attractive takes work and effort and leftists have a strong tendency to look for someone else to blame for their problems, including having a huge ass and a muffin top that makes the People of Walmart look positively lithe.
I do NOT believe liberals and leftists are born uglier than their average conservative counterpart. It’s not like they’re genetically inferior or anything. What I am talking about is that they put A LOT LESS EFFORT into their physical appearance. Ergo, this is not a criticism of their basic, physical beauty, let alone their genetics, but it IS a criticism of their psychology. You could take that Prius-driving, 45 year old, gray haired, super skinny yoga woman who never wore make-up, never did her hair up, give her a make over and she’d come out looking just fine. Just as you could take the cowering, tubby orbiting beta with the Seth Rogen beard, through him in the gym for 3 months and have him come out looking just fine.
But that’s the not the point.
The point is to your average leftists such working out and maintenance requires effort. That AND the added risk they may still “fail” in attracting a mate. It is their pure hatred and fear of effort and competition that not only drives their political and economic ideologies, but also drives their “romantic” or “mating” ideology.
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.ca/2012/09/why-leftists-tend-to-be-uglier.html
http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/photos/
I don’t want to discuss Cappy’s theory per se, other than to point out he cites some research that suggests he may be on to something, and that more feminine looking women tend to be Republicans. It’s colloquially known as the “Michele Bachmann” effect.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112001758
What I want to discuss is how an entire worldview can play out in various aspects of one’s personal life without necessarily any awareness on the part of the actor. Liberals may not realize that in blaming the “Man” for why they have a shitty job, they are also providing the justification for not hitting the gym, but the relationship exists nonetheless.
And I want to discuss that in the context of the woman who made 300 sandwiches for her boyfriend after she made him a sandwich and he told her she was on her way to earning an engagement ring, because to him, the act of making a sandwich was an act of love. And why else do you get engaged if not for love?
To him, sandwiches are like kisses or hugs. Or sex. “Sandwiches are love,” he says. “Especially when you make them. You can’t get a sandwich with love from the deli.”
http://nypost.com/2013/09/24/i-wooed-my-man-with-a-sandwich/
It’s actually pretty funny to see the feminist ladies at Slate’s Double XX blog and Jezebel try to understand how a woman, ANY woman, could possibly want to indicate her love for a man, and make that the basis of a potential marriage.
Who does that? Who shows a MAN they are loved and then thinks love is something that can sustain a marriage?
Amanda Hess is particularly hilarious trying to parse out the relationship between love and actions that demonstrate love.
How do we make sense of love in the time of “I’m 124 Sandwiches Away From an Engagement Ring”? The traditional romantic structures that previously organized our physical and emotional connections to other people are crumbling fast. Nobody buys one another root beer floats anymore. Everybody’s touching everybody else before they marry anyone. There are no boyfriends here. In the face of all this romantic disruption, some lovers are frantically constructing new frameworks—diamond-fishing sandwich blogs, for example—in a desperate attempt to reduce our strange and wonderful human experiences into another rote mechanical exercise. Stop. Love each other. Eat sandwiches. Don’t trade either of them for anything.
Don’t trade either of them for anything.
How can she not see that sandwiches and love are ONE AND THE SAME THING? Love is not just something you say. It’s something you do. Every day. For the rest of your life. For someone else. If you’re a heterosexual woman, that someone else is going to be a man.
And there’s the problem.
It doesn’t have to be a sandwich. It can be anything. Pizza. Cookies. Bread. A different handmade pasta every day for 300 days. Those things take skill, though. The beauty of a sandwich is that anyone can make one, regardless of their familiarity with the kitchen and the tools therein.
What it takes is a particular mindset. Your whole worldview needs to change to do something like make 300 sandwiches. You have to put the other person first, and take time out of your day, every day, to make a special effort to please another person. You think about their comfort and feelings and well-being and you put those things ahead of your own, not forever, not always, not in every single situation you will ever confront in your life together, BUT FOR THE TIME IT TAKES TO MAKE A SANDWICH.
What is that? Maybe 15 minutes? 15 minutes of your day, every day, is dedicated to the care of the person (man) you love.
And that’s just too much to trade, is it?
How sad. It’s not hard to imagine Amanda’s response, is it?
Well, what does he do for ME fifteen minutes a day? Get out the spreadsheets and start tabulating. 15 seconds to open the door for me. 45 seconds to go to the bedroom and fetch my purse because I have my boots on already and I forgot. 3 minutes to select an excellent Shiraz for our evening meal (South Africa! Try South Africa!). 8 minutes to run a hot bath and fill it with vanilla scented bubbles.
Keep careful tabs, and if he doesn’t hit the 15 minute absolute perfect trade-off mark, then fuck him and his sandwich. Chuck it in the trash. We’re after perfect equality, right? And the best way to achieve that is to be a temporal bean-counting bitch.
Yeah, okay. Good luck with that.
Jezebel wonders just how piss-poor a sandwich can be offered. If you’re gonna make someone a sandwich that he interprets as a gesture of love, then you want to put the LEAST amount of effort into that as possible, right? And maybe even try to trade off for blow-jobs instead?
Even though we now know, collectively as a Lady Monolith, how to please men, collectively as a Man Monolith, a few loose ends were left untied in Smith’s piece. Namely: how complicated a sandwich are we talking here? Would Eric still light up Stephanie’s ring finger if she just half assed the last 124 sandwiches by making him a pile of peanut butter on folded bread monstrosities? What is the minimum number of ingredients required for Eric to count it as 1/300th an engagement ring? Are there any substitutions for sandwichmaking? What’s the sandwich-to-blowjob conversion rate (my boss suggested that 1 BJ is worth 2 4-or-more-ingredient sandwiches; I’m inclined to agree)?
http://jezebel.com/lady-earns-engagement-ring-by-making-300-sad-sandwiches-1383822830
Where on earth does the stereotype of feminists as sulky, sour, bitter, loveless bitches come from? It’s such a mystery. There is just so much love and affection in that quote, isn’t there?
Let’s look at some of the comments. They’re so cute!
cassiebearRAWRU
Deli sandwiches don’t have love?
Why the fuck would I want love in my sandwich? That just takes up room that could be used for sliced jalapeños and bacon. Yesterday 12:46pm
Straight up denial. Food is not love.
quashitlikeitshot
Exactly. I am a great cook, and my husband loves my cooking. He has never, ever, once made me feel bad for not cooking. There is a difference.
This guy is an ass, and he can certainly kiss mine. Yesterday 1:02pm
Point right over the head. He never made her feel bad. On the contrary. He told her that the love she put into making to sandwiches was NOT going unnoticed, and that he was prepared to love her forever.
Wenchette
This morning I made a piping hot cup of disappointment for my husband. Rich black disappointment, tinged with regret and a sense of impending loss, served piping hot with two sugars and some cream. Yesterday 12:47pm
This is funny in the way that watching socially impaired people try to interact is funny. You feel awful at the same time. Schadenfreude. That’s what the word really means. You laugh at someone’s misfortune, but at the same time you feel absolutely terrible for them. The second part has to be there in order for the word schadenfreude to be the correct choice. Laughing at someone’s misfortune is just sadism.
Trust me. My father speaks German as a first language and it always drives him nuts when people confuse sadism with schadenfreude.
This comment made me laugh, but at the same time, holy fuck, what a bitch! I feel sorry for her and her husband.
One commenter acknowledges that buddy in question is no slouch in the kitchen, but it has no effect on the Jezzie ladies.
see you in rach-hell
I guess I’m the only person who has read her blog and realizes that their relationship seems fine, he cooks an equal amount for the both of them, and it’s not really as serious crazy-woman-desperate-to-get-married-to-a-misogynist as this article makes it sound.
Some might say the idea is sexist. “A woman in the kitchen—how Stepford Wife of you!” a friend argued. I say come over for dinner, and watch E whip up roasted duck breast with a balsamic and currant sauce with a roasted parsnip puree and shaved pickled beets in no time, and you’ll see who spends more time in the kitchen.
Some say I’m just desperate to get engaged. Hardly. I don’t have to be. E didn’t say “cook me 300 sandwiches or I’m leaving you!” He gave me a challenge—a dare, to some degree—and the type-A, Tracy Flick side of me can’t stand being challenged. I will prove to him and the rest of the world I can make the 300 sandwiches.
Seems hyperbolic to me. Yesterday 1:22pm
Nope. That kind of reasonableness won’t play here.
InterrobangUsee you in rach-hell391L
Her premise is revolting. That her husband cooks changes nothing about the fact that her blog is about making enough sandwiches to “earn” an engagement ring.
Or, you know, maybe that demonstrating the willingness to care and make an effort to provide for the other person is mutual? Seems like Stephanie has the better deal here, with Eric pureeing parsnips to go with roast duck.
Seriously, these women just can’t STAND the idea that any woman would demonstrate love by providing food for a MAN even though he obviously takes the time to provide food for her.
That is what brings me back to Captain Capitalism’s theory. Women who embrace feminism don’t seem to be able to perceive that they are encouraged to blame men for all their problems and actively hate men, and simply REFUSE to make a fucking sandwich because severe cognitive dissonance kicks in and it is impossible to reconcile all the contradictions of feminism as a philosophy.
“We don’t hate men” claim the feminists.
But make them a sandwich? Oh hell no. That will be interpreted as love and we love men so we can’t do anything that shows we love men.
Remember my advice on how to pick a wife? I mentioned providing food as being a critical condition, and I am now inclined to believe it may be the ONLY flag you need to look for.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/11/16/how-to-pick-a-wife-advice-for-single-men/
Food = love.
A woman who doesn’t provide food for you doesn’t love you. She doesn’t have to be Julia Child. Anyone can make a sandwich. Anyone can order pizza. Anyone can fry bacon.
“Make me a sandwich?”
It really means “do you love me”?
I’d listen to the answer very carefully. A woman who refuses is likely very much a feminist, even if she won’t use the word to describe herself.
And that’s not a woman you want.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
I wish you wouldn’t conflate “liberal” with “feminist”. Feminists are one small part of the liberal side of the equation.
Personally, I consider myself fiscally conservative (in the classic sense, not the new “don’t ever tax anyone for any reason” sense) but socially fairly liberal (in the “same sex couples deserve the same right to be happy, get married, raise children, etc as opposite gender couples do” sense).
There was a time when the Republican party in the US claimed to be the party of staying out of people’s bedrooms, but then they got in bed (pardon the pun) with the Religious Right, and that all changed.
I am *NOT* a feminist. I do believe that men and women should have the same rights, to the extent that they’re equal or equivalent. Meaning I don’t think a woman who IS schooled in the STEM fields and IS able to compete with men should be held down just because she is a woman, and I believe that a man who is wired towards being a stay-at-home Dad should not be ostracized for doing so.
But I think while Feminist usually equals Liberal, Liberal does NOT always equal Feminist, and I think it does a disservice to the people who believe in human rights to lump them in with Feminism.
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I think most people here would agree with the original equality feminism. Voting, schooling, have your own bank account, equal opportunity etc etc.
Where I think most disagree is with the gender feminism we have now, which is really thinly veiled feminine superiority. Everything masculine = bad everything feminine=good, but like, not too feminine. Don’t stay at home and raise your kids or wear pink or dresses or let your daughters play with dolls. That’s too feminine.
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First off on captain capitalisms theory. Obviously he has never been to the south or really any rural area. Very conservative, also very very fat. Does he think only lefties are porking out at the all you can eat buffet?
To me he’s just trying to find some bias to hang on a group he doesn’t like. Read what he wrote and insert Black for liberal. These kind of posts, just reaching to degenerate the opposition, do nothing to add to the real conversation and make him look, well, a tin foil hat wearing blogger.
Now, onto the rest. I agree with pretty much everything JB has written. Where feminism has lost its way (if it was ever on track) is this idea that doing ANYTHING for someone else is wrong and exploitation. Feminism as an ideology is what has created this ME culture we live in. It’s amazing what has happen because some rich, white housewives got bored with their lives back in the 50’s and 60’s. Latch key kids ( I was one), divorce rates, single motherhood all that because the feral woman was unleashed on society in a tornado of selfishness.
Feminism knows nothing of duty, self sacrifice, stoicism and putting others before themselves.
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I could not agree more. Then again, I seem to be in a minority of people who see “liberal vs conservative” not as a binary state, but as a continuum, and one along which you can reside at different places on different issues.
On the “feminism” scale, I’m probably somewhere in the center. On the “gay rights” scale, I’m pretty far toward the liberal side. On the “know where the money is going to come from before you pay for something” scale, I’m pretty far to the conservative end.
Anyone who has so bought into the binary state that they’re unwilling to admit that there’s ANY aspect of life that they’re on “the other end” of the spectrum has given up their obligation to think for themselves in favor of a feeling of belonging to the group.
Put another way, what the hell does two men or two women figuring out how to satisfy each other in bed and love each other in life have to do with national defense or the deficit or infrastructure? They’re all different things, if you don’t have varying opinions on them, you aren’t being “consistent”, you’re “not thinking critically”.
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“It doesn’t have to be a sandwich. It can be anything. Pizza. Cookies. Bread. A different handmade pasta every day for 300 days.”
Or even just meeting&greeting me at the door when I get home from work. Its one thing if she’s occipied managing the house or in the kitchen but quite another if she can’t put down the iphone and unstick her ass from the couch. Paying attention is even cheaper than the 15 minutes JB prescribes.
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Food is love. Making food for anyone is a great way to make a connection. In our society, nobody HAS to cook food – men or women – we do it because:
1) It’s fun
2) It’s better than anything you can get as a restaurant
3) It’s cheaper than ordering out every night
4) It creates a bond between people
That bond is actually really strong: the person who cooks is providing a meal for someone. that someone gets the necessary energy to sustain life and (unless they’re a real prick) appreciates the food and effort.
Those feelings of appreciation are generally reciprocal, and that fosters a good relationship.
I’ve known for a long time that food is love. That’s exactly what my dad taught me when I was growing up. It’s my experience that, in general, food brings people closer together. Even if the food sucks, you can laugh about how bad it was and enjoy a pizza together 🙂
Really, though, the context was lost to jezebel readers as the underlying story was spun to push their agenda forward. As I understand it, the agreement was more of a joke between two lovers, one of which decided it would make for a great series of blog entries (and a nice challenge to come up with 300 different varieties of sandwich).
Now I’m just waiting for the next blog series “300 different engagement rings” where the blogger finally settles on the engagement ring at choice #300. That would be a really neat spin on things.
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Probably not best to lead off with someone as oblivious as Captain Capitalism who clearly has no idea about the relatively liberal-and-(relatively) healthy BMI & fashion forward California vs the entire fat-ass, conservative, mullet-infested South. When I first moved there in the early 1990s (from San Diego) I was shocked at how fat, sloppy and ill-dressed they were.
Up till then, I’d thought the ‘fat bubba missing teeth’ was just some unfair movie stereotype, like the hillbillies in Deliverance. Instead it was like a trip to the fat farm and my family looked like concentration camp victims and high-fashion models because we had normall BMIs, decent haircuts, nice clothes and possessed all our teeth.
Also, FWIW, States that voted Bush over Kerry in 2004 were fatter than States that went blue. That comes from the CDC. So the little bit of IMPARTIAL data we have, that is data NOT run through someone’s bullcrap machine or is a personal anecdote dressed up as fact, says he’s wrong.
So if we’re going to play that game… Play on. We can all trot out our hateful stereotypes and data while pretending we’re above the fray.
Anyway, enough of Captain Clueless.
You do make some salient points later on. Especially with the low-hanging fruit of the bitter shits at Jezebel and Professional Ass-Troll Amanda Marcotte. These women have clearly lost sight of pretty much everything human-relationship-oriented in the mad dash for “Power through Pretend Victimization and PC Hate.”
I think it’s clear that is what happened with Sandwich Man/Woman. I think it’s clear that is what happened with that ‘relationship book’ they also whined about.
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With respect, JB, I think the problem is not that “food= love and feminists must never show that they love men,” but that too many women can’t act beyond the end of their own feelings. They FEEL “in love” and that starry-eyed regard should be enough. They don’t understand that real love requires action, often when you least feel like it (ask any parent). For a woman to demonstrate her understanding of this basic principle is not “turning marriage into a commodity”. Marriage IS a commodity, and always has been– a noble commodity, IMHO, but commodity nonetheless. A woman who expects a man to marry her based only on her feelings of love may as well be selling him an unopenable box with an invisible, intangible dragon inside. She’s expecting him to pay a premium for something he can’t see, can’t touch, and has to take entirely on faith without proof.
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Yeah, I cook all the time for my family. I know their likes and dislikes and cater to them and, therefore, show them, through my actions, that I know how to make each meal a wonderful experience for them. It also shows that I’ve listened (or observed) what they like or don’t which reinforces, to them, that I care about them.
That’s that kind of thing that people do when they’re not self-absorbed narcissists. You see what you family likes. You adjust what you do to make their experience better. In turn, they notice it and appreciate it.
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What you described yourself as has a name. It is called being a libertarian. I would also argue that feminism was never needed. Being a secular humanist is everything that feminists claim to be but are not. Feminism was always about socialism. This is why they were so mad about Margaret Thatcher becoming the first female Prime Minister of the UK. I am proud to say that I am a secular humanist, and a libertarian.
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So how does a “liberal” like you give women automatic respect and compensation for their credentials, and protect STAH dads’ “right not to be ostracized”. Let’s see… how about quotas requiring employers to hire women, and laws forcing men to stay at home with children? You’re a feminist waiting to happen
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Liberals may not realize that in blaming the “Man” for why they have a shitty job, they are also providing the justification for not hitting the gym, but the relationship exists nonetheless.
Sorry, but I have to join the call out that this typically propagandist conservative pablum and frankly bullshit.
For all my sarcastic disdain for feminism, I’m a fairly liberal guy. I’m a fan of alternative energy (though that does include nuclear power), I think “Obamacare” doesn’t go far enough, I think plutocratic politicians and corporate elitists are on the verge of destroying this country if not most of Western civilization. I also have a lot of liberal friends (and a lot of conservative ones as well). None of them “blame the ‘Man'” for shitty jobs, because most of them are incredibly hard working, and some of them are the most hard-working people I know. Some of them are overweight, but most exercise regularly and are fit. Frankly many more of my conservative friends are overweight and out of shape.
It’s a well-constructed and maintained myth, largely erected by Rush Limbaugh and his lying ilk, that liberals have a “hatred and fear of effort and competition.” Sure, there are some leftists who peddle, for example, the idea that “everyone should win” as evidenced by neutered kids sports leagues in some place, but I blame that more on feminism that liberalism. The two, as observed above, are not the same.
Okay. That aside, let’s get back to the fun of deconstructing the feminists, though I’m still going to disagree with JB.
The reason the feminists are up in arms about a woman making a sandwich for a man (the whole 300-sandwiches-for-an-engagement-ring thing I took to be more of an inside joke in that particular relationship, humor being something that feminists just really don’t get), the reason why they have taken the tack that “if he loved her, he wouldn’t ‘make’ her make sandwiches,” the reason why they think he’s such a misogynistic brute (ignoring the fact that he’s not “making” her do anything, she’s doing it willingly and with enthusiasm and humor) isn’t love. Or at least not just or even primarily love.
The reason feminists are outraged is that it’s about respect. And that’s the one thing that a woman should really never exhibit to a man.
By couching this in terms of “love,” the feminists are able to spin the situation and argue that “love shouldn’t be traded for” and that she shouldn’t have to “prove” she loves him by making sandwiches. Thus, they have, as usual, missed the point in their haste to fashion yet another cudgel with which to beat men.
But, of course, this story really isn’t about that. It’s about respect, and that’s one thing that feminists can’t handle. Feminists can’t really argue that women can’t love men because women would reject that as ridiculous given that so many women obviously love at least some men. But respect? They dare not touch that topic with a ten-foot poll. So they ignore the fact that the man in this story is an excellent cook and cooks for her often. For a feminist, that’s only right and natural: men really should be serving women. But to show her love and respect by making him sandwiches, a process that showed her how much the sharing of their love of cooking has made their bonds deeper, can’t be tolerated.
I, too, enjoy cooking and am pretty damn good at it. I did most of the cooking when I was married, largely because I can come home after work, glance at what’s in the fridge and pantry, and have something tasty on the table in about 30 minutes. My ex was and is an excellent cook and specialized in cajun food, but she still has to meticulously plan out menus in advance and just wasn’t as good at improvising. But she was happy to make me the occasional sammie. Which is a good thing. We may not be married any longer, but we still respect each other…
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Nope, I’m not a libertarian either, because increasingly libertarians seem to believe in no one but themselves.
I do not believe in letting people live on assistance for life, but having watched some EXTREMELY qualified people go unemployed for several years over the recession (most of them are finally employed again, thank goodness!), I recognize the need for some social programs to keep people afloat when someone tanks the economy.
I believe, which libertarians don’t seem to, in recognizing circumstances where someone didn’t have a fair shot and helping them out. It doesn’t mean I want everyone to be equal, but I think it’s reasonable to recognize that most of the wealthiest, most successful people in our country started out with at least middle class families. The “up by your bootstraps” myth that’s so popular among the libertarian party simply doesn’t exist, and I’m not a huge fan of claiming to have hit a triple when in fact you were born on at least second base.
I actually prefer to avoid labeling myself with ANY of the group names, because they all have a tendency to take very complex issues and try to simplify them down with rubrics that don’t necessarily take everything reasonably into account. I’d rather sit down and examine cases one by one and decide how I feel about it than to issue any kind of blanket statement like “those who take government assistance are takers and (by implication) sub-human”, when there are plenty of examples of government assistance being used for what it was INTENDED for: Helping someone who got screwed by circumstances stay on afloat long enough to get back on their feet again (to horribly mix metaphors).
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And you’re in such a rush to condemn anything liberal that you feel the need to ascribe to me things I did not say.
Try actually responding to what I SAID, and maybe I can answer you, but I refuse to defend myself for positions I never took.
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When you actually read what I said and respond to my words instead of insisting on building straw men and knocking them down, we’ll talk.
Read what I said. If someone has the skills to stand in, they should not be held back BECAUSE of their gender. That’s very different than saying that BECAUSE of their gender, they should be given a seat at the table even if they can’t stand with the other candidates.
And by the way, how does quotas requiring employers to hire women do anything for men who feel a calling to be stay at home fathers? Why do YOU leap immediately to the worst possible outcome and assume it’s the one I advocate.
I don’t know, frankly, HOW to enforce these things. But if two people come in to interview for a position, the one best suited should win, regardless of gender. Same is true for pretty much any other area of life. That is not anything CLOSE to the feminist position. I absolutely agree with the people who say we should not lower the bar for women so that they can become firefighters or join the army. The bar is set where it is not to prevent women from entering, but because it’s the requirements of the job. Fighting a fire isn’t suddenly going to become easier work because a woman is fighting it, the required hoses aren’t going to become lighter, the people who need to be carried out of the building aren’t going to become any smaller, so keep the physical requirements where they are. If women can’t pass them, they can’t be firefighters. But if women CAN pass them, they should not be prevented from being firefighters merely BECAUSE they are women.
Got it? Or do you want to accuse me of something else I didn’t say just because you’ve decided to play on the conservative team and give up your responsibility to actually think critically?
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Hmmm. This one originally didn’t show up. I thought it had been lost in the ether, which is why I wrote the second response.
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important lesson for all men: learn to cook, cook for yourselves, and ghost.
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I’m glad I’m not the only “fairly socially liberal” non-feminist out there.
I’m so sick of the caricature of liberalism that’s been pounded into the heads of those on the other side by Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity.
If someone disagrees with me and can defend their position, I want to hear it. I may (and have, historically, on a number of issues) change my position if you can show me a fact I was unaware of or a way of looking at things I hadn’t previously considered.
But if you decide (as the “gentleman” above has) that merely by cleaving to a few “liberal” attitudes, I am therefore every stereotype of the stupid, ill-considered, lazy liberal that has ever been promulgated on Fox News, you aren’t actually showing anything ill of ME, you’re merely showing YOURSELF to have relinquished your responsibility to think for yourself in favor of parroting back something your favorite pundit says.
Regardless, I’m going to try to stop commenting on the whole conservative/liberal thing at this point. It’s distracting from the real issue here, which I very much agree with, that as presented, the making of sandwiches isn’t a “misogynist expecting a woman to serve him”, but rather a “partner who discovered a very effective way of demonstrating their love for their partner deciding to do more of that.”
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That her husband cooks changes nothing about the fact that her blog is about making enough sandwiches to “earn” an engagement ring.
Because, you know, she is entitled to the engagement ring.
BTW, I agree with the critique of Captain Capitalism. I’ve been to the south and damn are they fat.
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Yeah, kinda hard to look at Rush Limbaugh and suggest that conservatives are, on balance, slimmer and more attractive.
Yeah, that’s just one example, but… I think in fact, what maybe has been noticed, is that those of means have a tendency to be more attractive and more in shape than those without means, and on the right they tend to assume that the rich GOP member is typical of the “real” GOP, while they tend to assume that the poor welfare recipient is typical of the “real” left.
If you have more money, you can afford to eat healthier foods, go to the gym, buy outfits that are more flattering to your particular form, pay expensive stylists to cut your hair in ways that better suit your face, etc.
It doesn’t mean conservatives are more or less attractive than liberals, it means that if you look at the rich conservatives as being your archetype on the one side and poor liberals as being the archetype on the other side, you’ve self-selected to gain evidence for your pre-determined bias.
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There’s actually a reason behind this (not reason as in an excuse, but as in a logical progression of how this epidemic happened). I, and most people where I live, grew up on a farms where there was hard labor to do at any given time. Hauling hay, butchering pigs, mending fence, hoeing the garden, chopping firewood etc. The food we eat here in the south is based around lifestyles where the men and woman burn 4000 calories a day just doing chores. After I got out of high school and moved on my own I gained nearly thirty pounds before I finally made the connection that I couldn’t eat like I used while working a desk job. Most people in the south are still at that point of realizing they can’t eat those high calorie meals anymore.
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Good point Jane
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You forgot to add that she can take the magic box and his money at anytime on top of that.
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The Captain Capitalism theory is really quite interesting, in part because it makes sense.
There is a large faction of leftism that is all about reducing or eliminating personal responsibility, a fact that has always caused me to associate feminism with leftism, since it seems like the same basic goals exist in both movements:
1. Reduction in personal responsibility for one’s lot in life;
2. Efforts to place the blame for the perceived negatives of one’s life on other entities over which the aggrieved has no power or control (or claims to have none);
3. Efforts to gain power and control over those entities that are designed to be surreptitiously self-defeating, with the goal being to ensure a constant state of grievance mongering (after all, if you got what you say you wanted, you’d suddenly be in control and have no one to blame but yourself, right? We can’t have that – that’s just a terrifying concept!)
4. Efforts to make the negatives into positives, and positives into negatives, in an attempt to “turn the tables” on the current power structure. (ie, fat is the “new beautiful”, and so forth).
Both movements are guilty of all of those things, and it has more or less convinced me that feminism is just an offshoot of leftism – just a more specialized, specific form of the same thing.
I find the entire idea of blaming other people for your lot in life to be repellant and abhorrent. You, and you alone, are responsible for the outcomes of your life. There are things over which you have no control that will affect the outcome of your life, such as your born-in intelligence, physical ability, health, and so forth, and some people get the short end of the stick in some or all of those things. That being said, you have a choice. You can use that as an excuse, or look at it as an obstacle to overcome. Your decision on how to deal with the negatives in your life will affect how successful you can be – no one has it perfect.
If you decide to use it as an excuse, you lose.
If you decide to look at it as an obstacle to overcome, you may win. You may also not succeed, but you’ll never lose until you give up and start using it as an excuse.
“Fat is beautiful” is an excuse. “Patriarchy” is an excuse. Your failure is because of the excuse, not the problem that you need to overcome. Fat people can lose weight – the laws of thermodynamics make it impossible for that not to be true. The “patriarchy,” to the extent that it ever existed, always made room for exceptional women to rise to the top. Men followed Joan of Arc into battle willingly because she proved herself worthy of being followed. You blame the patriarchy because so few women DID rise to the top, but I blame the use the patriarchy as an excuse for that fact.
It’s comfortable to have excuses; reasons, as it were, to never feel the need to try; to push yourself; to take risks; to reach for the stars and maybe even fail in your attempt to do so. It’s all about fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of failure. Fear that you, and you alone, are responsible for the fact that you are miserable, and that there is no one else to blame for it.
It is my belief that leftists are far more conservative than conservatives. They fear the unknowns of the free market. They fear being on their own, left to their own devices and masters of their own success. They want someone at the controls – someone throwing the switches and turning the knobs, making the decisions and doing the dirty work so that they can just be given a job, doing something comfortable with defined responsibilities and a quitting time every night.
They want someone at the controls for fear of uncontrolled, organic things like the free market, but also for one other reason:
So that they have someone to blame when things go wrong. Other than themselves, that is.
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nobody HAS to cook food – men or women – we do it because:
1) It’s fun
2) It’s better than anything you can get as a restaurant
3) It’s cheaper than ordering out every night
4) It creates a bond between people
5) it’s generally healthier and more filling than the chemically-laden, pre-packaged Frankenfood garbage one encounters in most restaurants and prepared food sections of supermarkets.
NOTHING, to me, says love like a home-cooked/homemade anything from scratch. A pre-packaged deli sandwich, to me, says “I can’t be bothered. Be grateful you’re even getting a second’s worth of my attention at all, let alone any food. Now fuck off and stop bothering me.”
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That is where I went wrong, also. I got into the habit of eating 3,000 plus calories a day When I was doing the sort of work and activities that burned that much fuel. I also grew up on a farm. I was also a wrestler and football player and outdoorsman and dug ditches for a living.
When I got into college and started sitting on my arse for most of the day every day, I suddenly discovered that the 3,000 plus calorie a day food intake was causing problems.
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The only problem with this theory is Margaret Thatcher.
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Seconded. Learning to do ANY AND EVERY domestic chore for yourself, whether you’re a man or woman, is just common(?) sense.
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Of course it is. If you end up living on your own you’re going to HAVE to do those things, so there’s really no excuse not to learn them. If you happen to marry someone who takes one or more of those chores off of your hands (in exchange, one would assume, for you taking some of the common chores off of theirs, but to each their own), great.
I also, by the way, am a firm believer in women in “traditional” relationships learning enough about doing the bills and managing the money to be able to do it in an emergency. As long as men die before women do, there’s likely to come a time in most women’s lives when they’ll have to take that stuff over, better to at least have a clue before hand rather than having one more thing to panic about when all you really want to be doing is grieving your lost spouse.
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I’m a fan of alternative energy (though that does include nuclear power),
Good, because nuclear energy is the only alternative to fossil fuels that is going to actually accomplish anything in the near future. But your left-leaning ilk all seem to not be aware of that, or don’t care (right up until their refrigerator stops working, of course, then it will be “occupy something or other to protest the fact that we have no energy, even though that’s what we’ve been agitating for for the last 30 years!)
Also, as I said before, most of the alternative energy push is a fear of the unknown – they want someone at the controls, switching switches, turning knobs. They have no confidence at all in the fact that the market will accommodate for changes when they present themselves, and want someone pushing the issue. Someone in control. Someone DOING SOMETHING. My point below stands – they are more conservative than the conservatives that trust that the markets will work the problem out just like they always have.
Also, that someone in control will be the guy to blame when it all goes to shit. You know, so that they can “occupy” something in protest of him. Notice very few of them are actually putting themselves out there to actually find a solution – they are just demanding that someone else do something. That way, no blame when it doesn’t work, and someone to blame, to boot.
I think “Obamacare” doesn’t go far enough,
PAY FOR MY HEALTHCARE OR I’LL HAVE YOU KILLED! http://notboutthing.blogspot.com/2013/06/good-discussion-in-comments-section.html
I think plutocratic politicians and corporate elitists are on the verge of destroying this country if not most of Western civilization.
The corporate guys only have this power because the politicians give it to them. Find me any situation at all where corporations are doing bad things and hurting society, and I’ll show you the government program that caused the problem. I’ve been playing this game with my lefty pals for years, and they’ve never been able to win.
It amuses me to no end that leftists see the government crony system working with corporations to hurt the little guy, and their response is to give the government MORE POWER to control the corporations. To the extent that the government has power over corporations, that is what is allowing the corporations to hurt the little guy. Leftists call for more of the same, and that will merely make the problem worse. I just don’t get the mindset here. See a problem caused by government having too much control in private corporations, fix it by giving the government more control over private corporations… I only hope you see the non-sequitor there…
None of them “blame the ‘Man’” for shitty jobs
Good. One, because there is no such thing as being locked into a “shitty job.” You have choice and agency. Use it. http://notboutthing.blogspot.com/2013/09/mike-rowe-is-really-solid-dude.html
That being said, consider the “occupy” movement. What were they bitching about?
The fact that they felt like they were owed better lots in life than those that they were “given.” Really? given?. They felt like someone had taken something from them, but they were blaming the wrong folks. They saw government as their ally, but government is what took! The market crashed because of government interventions. The bailouts occurred because the government decided to create them. Yet the leftists in the occupy movement blamed the corporations, who did act horribly, but were not the root cause of all of the horrible actions to begin with.
Compare the greed-driven, envious occupy movement with the much maligned Tea Party movement, merely asking to be left alone so that they can control their own destiny better.
Not that they don’t have some pretty serious flaws, but if you can’t see the plank in leftism’s eye, too, then I’m not sure what to say…
It’s a well-constructed and maintained myth, largely erected by Rush Limbaugh and his lying ilk, that liberals have a “hatred and fear of effort and competition.”
I fucking hate Limbaugh and Hannity. They are political baiters for their own purposes and lie and obfuscate to make their points constantly.
But the “fear of competition” meme wasn’t created by them, nor is it perpetuated in my mind by them, either. It is created and perpetuated by constant reinforcement when leftists talk about “fairness” and “fair shares” and “bending the cost curve” and so forth. All of those things are code words for “you have more than me, so you owe me some of that.”
It is envy and greed and jealousy, all things that I cannot separate from the leftist way of looking at things simply because they are core tenants of the leftist philosophy. Leftists want to intervene in everyone else’s life and tell them how much energy they should use, how much money they should be allowed to have, what sort of employment and social contracts they should be allowed to make, how they should choose to purchase healthcare, and how they should go about creating and maintaining social contacts. I can’t imagine anything more evil than that. They want a say in everything, and the root motivator for all of it is greed and envy, and most of them won’t accept that.
My biggest departure from leftist thought is that I accept that humans have greed. I accept that humans have ambition based on trying to be better than each other. I accept all those things, and I call them what they are – positive things when focused in a positive way, and negative things when focused in a negative way.
Leftism focuses them in a negative way.
That is why I cannot get on board with a movement that I would otherwise agree with, quite readily, on many other things.
To say that the needs of many outweigh the needs of the individual, is merely to say that some people’s needs are more important than others. That is tyranny, and that is exactly what leftism espouses. Fuck that shit.
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I also, by the way, am a firm believer in women in “traditional” relationships learning enough about doing the bills and managing the money to be able to do it in an emergency. As long as men die before women do, there’s likely to come a time in most women’s lives when they’ll have to take that stuff over, better to at least have a clue before hand rather than having one more thing to panic about when all you really want to be doing is grieving your lost spouse.
THIS.
After my father died two years ago, my mother, after nearly fifty-two years of marriage, found herself in this position. It wasn’t that Dad never let her do any of the household financial management; it’s just that she trusted HIM to do it because she felt that as head of the household such a responsibility should be on his shoulders (needless to say, Mom is very much a traditionalist). At first she was completely lost, to the point where my brother and I had to sit down with her and guide her through the processes that she needed to use to keep up with things.
What really shocked us both is that Mom worked by Dad’s side as his secretary/bookkeeper for nearly 30 years after he established his own accounting firm, yet she seemed clueless as to how to track her own finances. She’s still struggling a bit to stay on top of things, but has, for the most part, gotten back on her feet.
So yes, every woman ABSOLUTELY needs to become savvy at managing household finances, for her own sake if not the famiy’s.
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” Feminism as an ideology is what has created this ME culture we live in. It’s amazing what has happen because some rich, white housewives got bored with their lives back in the 50′s and 60′s. Latch key kids ( I was one), divorce rates, single motherhood all that because the feral woman was unleashed on society in a tornado of selfishness.
Feminism knows nothing of duty, self sacrifice, stoicism and putting others before themselves. ”
ABSOLUTELY ! All the rest is mere hogwash to cover up the truth.
” For the female of the species is deadlier than the male” — Rudyard Kipling.
I had never dreamt that this could apply to human beings too !
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JB, you are awesome. My wife stays at home with our children and often talks about how lucky she is not to work while I go spend the day surrounded by engineers. I love that I can go to work and leave the children with her instead of with strangers, but I still sometimes get jealous when her day consists of taking the kids to the library and the beach. We both appreciate what the other does and tell each other all the time, but I feel it the most when I come home from work and she has made a new meal she thinks I’d like or just picks up a treat for me from the grocery store.
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Goober, this is why I tried to make the point above that feminism and liberalism are two very different things. Nearly everything you mention in this comment is a direct result of feminism, and while it’s fairly axiomatic that all feminists are liberal, not all liberals are feminists by a long shot (as in “gender feminists”: most of think having basic legal rights, voting, etc. are pretty okay for women since they are human beings and citizens).
Most liberals I know are perfectly fine with embracing personal responsibility; feminists aren’t. We don’t blame others for our lot in life, we work to improve it, unless there is an actual reason to place blame; feminists place blame on any man they can, never on themselves or other women. “Fat is beautiful” and “patriarchy” are feminist, not liberal ideas.
As a liberal I’m a big fan of capitalism. Indeed, I’d love it if we could get back to more free market capitalism for everyone, not just a few who can game the rules.
Let’s not unnecessarily confuse the two; you’ve seemed smarter in your commentary here than to unthinkingly swallow the conservative propaganda line. I damn extremists on either side of the political divide, and this line of thought is to the right as PETA is to the left…
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Gawker lady thinks that being asked to make a sandwich is grounds for murder most foul:
The only proper punishment for such culinary degradation is obviously death…
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Oh my god, I thought that was a joke!
It’s not.
Jesus. Making a sandwich is now the most degrading thing a woman can do for the man she loves?
It’s really gotten THAT bad?
😦
http://gawker.com/bitch-make-me-300-sandwiches-orders-beautiful-woman-1383577562
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For making a sandwich? LOL.
I’m sure all the men who cook for their women feel totally degraded and objectified right about now. It’s amazing how quickly modern feminism is literally self-destructing with poor reasoning.
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I’ll issue a challenge. Find a feminist advocating the a woman should do something nice for her man.
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Wow. the shitstorm this has caused is just pathetic. I despair of ever finding a decent woman who hasn’t been trained to think she doesn’t have to do anything in a relationship.
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Anyone who thinks a deli sandwich can’t be made with love has never been to Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI.
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Goober, this really isn’t the place for this discussion so I’ll limit myself to a few brief comments:
Healthcare: It’s not about having someone else pay for your healthcare. It’s about reforming an incredibly inefficient and labyrinthine system of inscrutable insurance that masks an inefficient and inscrutable medical care system that delivers rather poor healthcare. When’s the last time you were able to comparison shop for a medical procedure? It’s said American has the best healthcare in the world, which is wrong: we have some of the best medical practices and medical care, but not healthcare by several different standards.
It amuses me to no end that leftists see the government crony system working with corporations to hurt the little guy, and their response is to give the government MORE POWER to control the corporations.
Actually, most of us would gladly settle for enforcement of the current laws on the books to “control” corporations.
That being said, consider the “occupy” movement. What were they bitching about?
About the large investment banks and other financial entities that crashed the U.S. and world economy reaped huge benefits and hundreds of billions of public dollars in bailouts instead of properly going bankrupt and seeing their executives criminally prosecuted. I actually spent some time at the original Occupy near Wall Street to see for myself since I didn’t buy the conservative misinformation about it. They blamed the government just as much as the banks. And, no, the financial system didn’t crash because of the government intervening (Frannie and Freddie contributed but were actually quite late to an already rigged game).
Most of us want fairness of opportunity, not outcomes. Fairness of outcomes is a feminist creed, not really a liberal creed.
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LostSailor;
I’m not a conservative, either. If you look at my list of evils committed by the left – the control that they want over people’s lives – I could write a list nearly as long on the conservative side of things that THEY want to control.
The desire to control others is the epitome of evil. Period.
Leftists and conservatives alike both want that control. They just go about it in other ways.
Nearly everything you mention in this comment is a direct result of feminism, and while it’s fairly axiomatic that all feminists are liberal, not all liberals are feminists by a long shot (as in “gender feminists”: most of think having basic legal rights, voting, etc. are pretty okay for women since they are human beings and citizens).
I agree – feminists are liberals. Liberals are not feminists. This is conceded and I never tried to make the point otherwise.
Most liberals I know are perfectly fine with embracing personal responsibility;
Not my experience. Oh, they’ll pay lip service to it, but when the chips are down, they will always – ALWAYS – find someone else to blame. I don’t typically listen to people when they pay lip service to something. I listen to their actions. And the liberal left has shown to me time and time again that they want nothing to do with personal responsibility.
We don’t blame others for our lot in life, we work to improve it,
By demanding that someone (else) DO SOMETHING. That’s been my experience with left-oriented folks. They are all about working to improve their lot. By trying to pass a law to make the field more favorable to their wants and desires, and fuck everyone else.
They are all about authoritarian command and control. They lose, and instead of learning from their mistakes and trying not to make the same mistake again, they agitate for laws to be passed to make it illegal to make that mistake. Think “Occupy”. That more or less proves my point, right? Bunch of kids got worthless degrees, couldn’t find work, and were agitating for legislation to fix that problem instead of learning a trade or going back to school to get a useful degree this time…
Made my point yet?
As a liberal I’m a big fan of capitalism. Indeed, I’d love it if we could get back to more free market capitalism for everyone, not just a few who can game the rules.
Then you’re not a liberal in that respect. By the definition of modern liberalism, they are more oriented towards a top-down, command and control organization, as opposed to organic, free markets. You may self-identify as liberal, but on this one respect, you aren’t one.
As for “gaming the rules” that is a common argument that I hear coming from the left on free markets and capitalism, but having the ability to “game the rules” is a result of a CORPORATIST state, not a capitalist one. We haven’t been capitalist in quite some time, once you get above a certain size in a company (I’d say about half a billion in revenue or so, but that’s just my gut). Once you’re talking about a company larger than that, you aren’t talking capitalism any more, you’re talking CRONYISM. That is where the left and I align perfectly, and that’s where I depart from the conservative line, because most conservatives are pro-cronyism, big time.
The issue is conflation of cronyism with capitalism, and the fact that guys like you see cronyism, hate it, assume that means you are a leftist, and you’re wrong. It isn’t “either/or”. Leftism wants to eliminate free market capitalism. LIBERTARIANISM wants to eliminate cronyism.
Lots of self-identified leftists are way more libertarian than they care to admit. I’d wager that you’re one of them.
Let’s not unnecessarily confuse the two;
See, here is where you and I disagree. I’d posit that it is you who are confused, not me. You say “leftist” I say “anti-capitalism”. They are the same thing by definition. The very definition of modern liberalism is to put the screws down on the free markets in favor of a top-down, command and control structure, which will absolutely, positively make cronyism WORSE, not better. You are anti-CRONYIST, but not anti-capitalist, meaning you aren’t at leftist at all, at least in this capacity. I think that’s where we’re departing. Your desire for leftism won’t fix the problems that you are seeing – it will make them WORSE. Leftism and cronyism are like peas and carrots!
you’ve seemed smarter in your commentary here than to unthinkingly swallow the conservative propaganda line.
Oh, don’t you worry. You’re just mistaken about the party line thing. I’m not spouting conservative propaganda. I’m talking truth. We’re just disagreeing on what truth is, because you seem to think that there can possibly be such thing as a pro-capitalist leftist, when the very definition of the term makes that an oxymoron. You just aren’t a leftist – it’s that simple. You are left of center on some things, but libertarian right of center on others. Essentially, you’re a libertarian with a “heart”, although I’d even argue that the “heart” part is misguided because you can do a lot more for folks than agitate for the government to fix it for them.
Me? I’m an individual freedom junkie. Really, there are two places that I disagree with leftism, and that’s all:
1.) Government should be minimized in every facet of life, not just in the bedroom. Leftism wants to grow it in every facet EXCEPT the bedroom.
2.) Government should not be forcing individuals to make “approved” choices and punishing “unapproved” choices unless those choices cause harm to other people. Leftism is all about forcing choices on people, and making decisions for them by assuming that they wouldn’t make good decisions for themselves if given the chance.
That’s it. Those are the big sticking points.
Believe it or not, Both of those same sticking points apply to my assessment of conservatives, too, plus a few more. Meaning I’m more leftist than I am conservative by that metric…
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Ian Ironwood had post in a similar vein to the Food = Love idea here http://theredpillroom.blogspot.co.nz/2013/05/red-pill-marriage-when-make-me-sammich.html
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In case you were wondering, I self-identify as a “classic liberal.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
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Since there is so much discussion here of liberal vs. conservative and I see some classic assumptions being made – take a look at Jonathan Haidt’s work for some useful perspectives. Anyone who has the balls to call out his own in-group (liberal academia) on their biases gets my respect. While his TED talk uses some insulting stereotypes about conservatives, look past your primate tribal ‘out group’ filters to see his points. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/ Also note his paper “Understanding Libertarian Morality.”
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To the extent that our healthcare system is royally fucked up, it is where the government intervened to create complex, labyrinthine rules to help support their cronies already established and capable of navigating the mess.
Your solution to a problem that the government created is more government intervention.
I rest my case.
If you think that’s going to make things better I really can’t help you, because they screwed it up in the first place.
What is the definition of insanity again?
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One last thing before I leave, since you started down the path towards making the assumption that I don’t think that our healthcare system needs to be fixed…
My blog. Three years ago…
http://notboutthing.blogspot.com/2010/12/wherein-i-fix-healthcare-system-no-need.html
This all-encompassing faith in all things government will lead you astray, friend. It will cause you to miss perfectly reasonable fixes to simple problems that don’t involve more government. In this case, less is better.
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Actually, most of us would gladly settle for enforcement of the current laws on the books to “control” corporations
Such as???
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About the large investment banks and other financial entities that crashed the U.S. and world economy
How did they crash it?
By following the explicit instructions that the government gave them on subprime loaning. Specific, explicit instructions, and promises that they’d be taken care of if it backfired, and help in hiding the results (Glass Steagal?). From the government.
I don’t excuse the corporations going along with this, but this is the government’s fault, not the banks. You lost sight of that because of the faith in government that you must have to follow your world view.
reaped huge benefits and hundreds of billions of public dollars in bailouts instead of properly going bankrupt
Who allowed them to reap those benefits? Who gave them the bailouts? Who kept them from going properly bankrupt? Answer those questions, friend, and you’ll have your true villain here.
and seeing their executives criminally prosecuted.
Why would you prosecute your cronies?
I actually spent some time at the original Occupy near Wall Street to see for myself since I didn’t buy the conservative misinformation about it. They blamed the government just as much as the banks.
And then begged the government to do something about it all. The very people that caused the problem to begin with. They very people that saved the corporations, bailed them out, and decided not to prosecute the CEOs, while allowing them to take huge bonuses for their “hard work.” Again, this faith in government is pathological. THEY DID THIS TO US. And you want to give them more power over your life. More say in your decisions. More daily influence in every part of your being. How the hell can you want that? How can’t you see it?
And, no, the financial system didn’t crash because of the government intervening (Frannie and Freddie contributed but were actually quite late to an already rigged game).
You are absolutely wrong. You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried. Fannie and Freddie weren’t the beginning. The beginning goes all the way back to Jimmy Carter, and furthered by Clinton, and then tribpled down on under Bush. Repeal of Glass/Steagal? Ever look that up? They all fucked us royally (and have been for years) in a misguided attempt to make themselves feel good and artificially boost the economy. This subprime scheme would never have existed if it weren’t for the government insurance of the scheme. No banker in his right mind would have taken part in it under a free market, because it could only have lead to ruin. The only way this thing existed was because of the cronyist state. You just can’t argue any other way.
Most of us want fairness of opportunity, not outcomes. Fairness of outcomes is a feminist creed, not really a liberal creed.
Then stop with all the talk of “fairness” and “paying fair shares” and all that. Stop telling hard working business owners that they owe something (You didn’t build that!) to you because they got rich and you didn’t. If you want to get rich, start a business and go for it. Stop telling workers that they can’t work for any wage less than what you say that they should work for (as if there would never be any other reason to work other than an hourly wage). Stop intervening in everybody’s life, and let them make their own decisions. You’ll have your fairness of opportunity if you get the government OUT of your lives, not INTO it.
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Seriously. If the gals at Jezebel are at all indicative of modern American women hood, I can’t imagine how any young man in his right mind would want to get married.
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Good job summarizing corporatism versus capitalism, Goober, I was just about to provide that summary myself before I noted your comment.
I actually agree that the problem with the left/right dichotomy is that both sides have taken a massively leftist (marxist/socialist) cant. ‘conservative’ leaders like beck and Limbaugh are espousing a form of conservatism that has absolutely nothing in common with classical conservatism, and could be more adequately established as neoconservatism.
Corporatism, which is often mislabeled ‘capitalism’ by left and right alike, is a socialist version of capitalism where an oligarchy gains a virtual monopoly (rather than a government) by various means. In general, corporatism can ONLY exist where there is an unethical and non-capitalist means to eliminate competition, in America this means is through frivolous lawsuits (enforced by government court system), protection from punishment for illegal or unethical activity (limited liability) and a more-or-less uneducated or easily manipulated consumer base (Women).
Women-as-consumers tend to be dramatically more collectivist, and make decisions as a bloc rather than as an individual. That means that advertising and manipulating them as consumers is far less expensive, far more profitable, and worth encouraging wealth transfer at any cost.
Frankly, women tend to be less profitable as PRODUCERS than men, while being more valuable as CONSUMERS than men… That means that corporatism, in chasing the bottom line, wants to encourage as much wealth transfer from men to women as possible. Corporations, in the end, encourage liberalism because it dramatically facilitates wealth transfer from producer to consumer.
Libertarians do not want to smear themselves with the paint of ‘conservative’ even though in the end their philosophy of individual control and virtually no government interference is enormously farther ‘right of center’ than modern conservatism.
You want gay marriage? guess what, rightists consider marriage something the government has no business legislating. Far far right. ‘marriage’ is either the domain of the church, or the domain of the individual.
Equality of opportunity? no laws about hiring or firing. individual choice. Far far right wing.
modern ‘conservatives’ and modern ‘liberals’ are more or less indistinguishable from each other… the only differences are who they want ‘at the top’ of our rapidly-expanding regime, and whether or not they go to church on sunday.
‘liberals’ ARE supporting feminism. feminism and liberalism go hand-in hand. If you give yourself the ‘liberal’ label, you are tacitly supporting feminism, obamanation, socialism, marxism, multiculturalism, and the government’s right to interfere with individual liberties.
‘Conservatives’ are supporting socialism, marxism, multiculturalism, and the government’s right to interfere with individual liberties. Oh, and guns.
What many who self-identify as liberals are really supporting, if they do not toe the liberal and feminist line, is either libertarianism or paleoconservatism. Perhaps what they really need to do is simply take on a new title.
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WOw. That must have been some sandwich…
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Wait, are we really surprised that hardcore feminists are homicidal psychopaths? after Valerie Solanas made it perfectly clear decades ago?
There’s a reason ‘witches’ were burned at the stake… it encouraged embittered lesbian charlatans to stop selling poisons to self-righteous housewives.
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Every morning, I make my husband a cup of tea and take it up to him in bed. I have mentioned it in passing to a friend and got a OMG WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? reaction. And I’m ashamed to realise, I laughed it off by saying it’s the easiest way to make him actually get out of bed and go to work. Great. I felt slightly embarrassed that I like to do nice things to make his life better, and had to make it seem more selfish so I didn’t look weird! I also make him (well, ok, us) homemade pizza – which he loves. It’s kinda my version of giving him flowers.
Every now and then he gets up early before his cuppa. And I tend to apologise while hastily putting the kettle on (well, I AM British – I have genuinely been known to apologise for the weather.) And every single time he tells me that my apology is ridiculous and unnecessary – he appreciates it when I do nice things for him, but it is NOT something I *have* to do for him.
On the handful of occasions my husband has got up before me, I am awoken with a cup of tea in bed. Do these morons at Jezebel and Slate REALLY not get that there is a difference between choosing to do something nice and being taken for granted? Urgh.
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You have. Her name is judgybitch. She fits the ‘classic’ definition of feminist: self-motivated, capable, and willing to take personal responsibility for her life.
of course, if you mean the modern, re-branded, marxist, embittered, man-hating, lesbian, vagina-worshipping, murderous, loudmouthed, obnoxious, female-supremacist and litigious gorilla feminist that thinks magic spells and legislation are the routes to personal fulfillment, good luck with that. It is antithetical.
And I wouldn’t label JB as ‘feminist’ now, I think she’d be as offended as a happy and excited straight guy being called ‘Gay’.
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“I do NOT believe liberals and leftists are born uglier than their average conservative counterpart. It’s not like they’re genetically inferior or anything. What I am talking about is that they put A LOT LESS EFFORT into their physical appearance.”
Obesity by State:
Red States vs Blue States:
So much for his ‘theory’. Took me all of 30 seconds to debunk that garbage.
That guy and all the other ‘The Left is responsible for everything that has gone wrong, ever.’ Right Wing cultists are just as intellectually lazy as the ‘Where’s my handout, you cisgendered, transphobe, rape apologist, heteronormative privileged white male?’ Left Wing cultists.
Why anyone with even a modicum of logic and reason takes that idiot seriously is beyond me.
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Love=$ right along with I, me, my, and mine…those are the only hamster wheel equasions that seem logical in the feminist mindset….
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Really. You assert something, don’t prove it, and then rest your case? Not much of a lawyer…
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The current feminist view of relationships is where the woman only receives and only the man gives. one direction only is allowed. Most women have figured out this kind of deal doesn’t work out. Partly because it’s based on the idea that men are so addicted to sex we will become slaves for it as long as the woman controls it properly.
I’ve personally witnessed this behavior. A long time ago I overheard a woman talking about how she cooked for her boyfriend, and she was instantly leaped upon by a feminist who overheard the conversation, who then demanded the boyfriend should do the cooking. The first woman had to go instantly into defensive mode and explained that he maintained the car, and that they took care of each other, but just in different ways.
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I have a slightly different theory, on feminists in general and the sammich thing in particular. It’s not, like, published or backed up by scientific data; but it does fit my experience and matches the general facts.
First, I don’ t think that a lot of the young women who participate in doctrinaire, academic feminism come to the subject because of some flash of neutral, logical insight. The much more common case, I think, is that they turn to feminism after some particular personal experience; and particularly bad experiences with men.
The trajectory I imagine as the prototype runs like this (and may sound familiar to many readers): Girl digs guy who is, in fact, an asshole. She’s nice to him, trying first to instantiate the relationship she wants to have exist; and when that fails — since he is, in fact, an asshole who treats her poorly — she may keep on trying to change him or rescue him. This will also fail — since he is, in fact, an asshole — until she finally gives up.
At that point she has to make a choice, over how to interpret the past. The two main branches are (1) All men are basically assholes, versus (2) Men differ, but I’m attracted to the assholes in particular. In nearly all cases, (2) is actually the correct answer; but she can’t bring herself to cognize it, so she resorts to (1) instead and another proto-feminist is born.
After this, all the horrid tropes you are used to hearing from shrill feminists follow naturally, and I won’t go through the list here. But the sandwich thing in particular, or the general notion of doing something nice for your partner, is associated in her subconscious memory (yeah, I like Freud) with the ghastly and humiliating experience of having waited hand and foot on the asshole boyfriend, only to have him treat her like shit in return — because he was, in fact, an asshole. Because she cannot face the truth, that servicing an asshole was her fault and her decision, she must instead picture all men as acting domineering and degrading towards all women. And so she cannot countenance the idea of any woman, anywhere, doing any nice thing for a prospective BF/husband, because that’s willing participation in degradation.
As I said, I don’t have any firm numbers but I believe that this trajectory is a typical one, which explains a lot of feminist behavior that you see and which JB skewers so regularly. What really needs to be said to these women, in my opinion, what would really do them and the world the most good, is “It’s not the fault of men as a whole that you had such bad experiences, it’s your fault for having picked assholes in particular. So stop blaming men and get your head on straight instead, and we’ll all be better off for it — it’s a win-win if you have the mental courage to face the truth.”
As I said, it’s not published (until now!) or copyrighted, so feel free to re-distribute at will.
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You forget that in the feminist mind, vagina means that you are responsible for the universe. vagina is god. deigning to shower that vagina on a man is more than enough reason that he should do everything and anything he possibly can with no recompense, because you are the keeper of the box of god.
You know what I have seriously considered? female slavery. Frankly, most women seem to equate their hoochie with monetary value. What PROVES value more than actually BUYING a woman? you show them exactly what they are worth by actually paying that much for them.
Before you laugh, bear in mind that a huge amount of ‘female best seller porn’ revolves directly around the concept that hoochie is a commodity that can be purchased with cash, and that female slavery is the ultimate rush. Bodice-rippers are by far the best-selling female fantasy fare, better selling even than fantasy, science fiction, and military fiction combined.
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although I have to disagree about frying bacon… frying ba con is an art form, especially when you live at high altitude. It is almost impossible for anyone but a true genius to make good bacon in Utah.
Also, I have to disagree about the sandwich, I think it’s a matter of perception. To most women, a sandwich is a snack you pick up between two fingers. Often it is tiny, cut into darling shapes or triangles, or decorated with a smiley jelly face and stuffed into a kid’s lunch box. (BTW, this impression is partially from the cooking channel. Old t-rex arms, hamptons redneck, ex-country-singer, and budget suicide woman cannot make a real damned sandwich to save their lives… all they seem to make is arugala, pesto, and watercress dainties garnished with something that belongs in a glass of alcohol. Of course, homeschooler can make real food, but she’s an exception. Statistically, that means 4 out of 5 TV chef women cannot make a damned sandwich)
To a man, however, a sandwich is a rugged, thickly-packed meal you can hold in your hand. It’s not a good sandwich unless you cannot fit your mouth around all the toppings (let alone the bread). A sandwich is like a religious sacrament to the god of food, and it should have all of your favorite foods stuffed in there with a healthy helping of mustard. Meat, slices and slabs and balls and spoonfulls of heaping meat, stuffed with ‘fillers’ that are not quite as good as the meat but add to the flavor. Throw on something pickled in vinegar, add a sauce or fifteen, stack the thing up to the ceiling… but by god, NEVER put a toothpick in the top cause we will bite it off! stick it all in thick, hearty slices of bread, or maybe just saw a whole loaf in half. For bonus points, cook the bread in bacon grease or find some way to drape bacon or other meats and cheeses onto the outside like an overcrowded refugee ship passing Ellis island on the road to the land of the free and the home of the brave. A good sandwich is like meat with the constitution of the by-god United states of America wrapped around it. It is everything that is good and decent with the world. It is sex without having to throw away a messy condom afterwards, It is like Dirk Benedict and Han Solo and Conan the Barbarian and James Bond and the most interesting man in the world from those Dos Equis commercials just handed you a membership to the ‘spaceship of the month’ club.
Respect the Man Sandwich.
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I just saw this over Facebook with the usual feminist outrage (it’s their official sport). “Misogyny!” “Sexist!” “Chauvinism!” “Real men don’t really care about sandwiches!”, cry the strong, empowered feminists. Honestly, the world doesn’t need more feminists and white knights to tell us what real men really do and don’t want.
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You can still have all that and be a libertarian. You don’t seem to understand what libertarianism is.
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You mean he doesn’t smack you and shout “DAMN IT BITCH WHERE IS MY CUPPER!!!”?
What a strange man.
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You should adjust for age really if you were doing it properly.
I’m fairly confident that:
A) Liberals are on average younger than conservatives.
B) People tend to get fatter as they get older.
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“Jesus. Making a sandwich is now the most degrading thing a woman can do for the man she loves?”
If it’s for someone hoping that this could ever be the most desirable (by the majority of men) spousal role model for women anywhere on Earth, then why not?
A perfect example of magical thinking and “setting oneself up to fail“.
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I think George Clooney, Robert Redford, Cameron Díaz and Katy Perry are leftwingers.
The Kennedys, Bill Clinton, Matt Damon…
Well, in my country, attractve people use to be leftwingers: Javier Bardém, Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Rafael Nadal, Pep Guardiola… and ugly as fuck people use to be rightwingers, like presidents Mariano Rajoy or Aznar. Usually, rightwingers are associated to asexuality or gayness in the closet with strong homophobic attitude (like president Rajoy. It is a rumor). The typical rightwinger female in Spain used to be called “monja alferez” (liutenant nun)
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Correction: Rafael Nadal is rightwinger.
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I judge libertarians by what they say and do. I understand the basic philosophy, and find it entirely compatible with the insane theories posited by many self-described libertarians.
In my view, libertarian philosophy would work well in the same universe that pure socialism would work well; specifically, a universe in which human nature could be ignored without detriment.
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I always find it funny when some woman tries to tell me to man up, or tries to tell me what a ‘real man’ is. My father has that right, my peers get my attention, great men in history help me define and refine it, but someone that has no basis for comparison?
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I thought he was leftie :p
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Most of Hollywood are left wingers, but most of Hollywood stars are pretty fucking dumb and unaware of reality.
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But wait, you’re equating fat with unattractive! That’s fat shaming! We don’t do that here.
Oh, wait, sorry… That’s right, we’re a REALITY based community.
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I think you may be right, but I’d add peer pressure. Some of the most ardent feminists I knew during my time in college (many of whom have since backed off a whole lot!) got there because they were at a women’s college and that was the culture.
I actually witnessed a couple of these women actively ramping up the kinds of minor awkward disagreements we all have in HS into the sort of abuse story necessary to be accepted into The Culture. Obviously if you couldn’t speak to HOW men were all evil and how you had personally been harmed by a Man (better if you had multiple such stories), you were not REALLY a feminist, and a traitor to your gender.
Why they accepted me and a few of my friends, I don’t know. They had to tell themselves that we were “good guys” and “honorary lesbians” so that it was OK to hang out with us. Men suck, but we weren’t REALLY men. (At that point in my life, I was pretty introverted, so it wasn’t difficult for people to conflate whatever personality or beliefs onto me they wished, because I didn’t really go about spouting my beliefs in public).
Actually, this reminds me of another of my favorite stories of people taking the “in crowd” too far: Years ago, I used to spend a lot of my time going to science fiction conventions. Yes, I’m a nerd. Anyway, one thing that’s pretty common (or at least was in those days) was that most of the people at cons had obviously psychological “wedgie” scars. Very few of them had been the popular kids in their grade and high schools.
And I always found it highly instructive to watch the two distinct paths people walked down. About half of the attendees banded together into a “let’s all treat each other well, we know what it feels like to be on the bottom rung, it sucks, let’s be nice to one another, despite our differences”. The other half joined cliques and ran around loudly declaring “Oh, you’re not a REAL fan if you don’t write fan fiction” or “You’re not a TRUE fan if you don’t like Star Wars” or… whatever. They took the lessons of high school and tried to band together with like minded people to set up a similar set of strata, but with themselves at the top so that they could treat others the way they were treated.
The urge to be a part of the in crowd is high, and I think a LOT of young women feminists join the group because it’s an in crowd they can feel a part of and identify with, and so what if the group holds fervent beliefs they themselves do not really hold, it’s a group that accepts them and places them at the top of the social hierarchy!
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Feminists can’t even find it in their heart to condone the making of a sandwich for a hungry man. What’s that again about how feminists don’t hate men? They certainly don’t like men. I would make a man a sandwich. I would make a woman a sandwich. It’s really not that difficult.
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I was just thinking that myself. As a former professional Chef, cooking has always been one of my go to wooing strategies when dating a new woman. Date #4 or 5 have her over and blow her mind with some food 99% of them could never cook for themselves.
All this time I thought I was doing something nice, to now find out it was degrading the whole time.
Man, my family is going to be upset when I have to break the news to them. I have been cooking the holiday meals for Family gatherings (up to 30 people) for 15 years now.
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You
Are
An
Oppressive
Misogynist
Can I come for dinner? I love being oppressed with fabulous food.
😀
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I am so with you… although for me it’s more baking than cooking. I make a cheesecake that has won awards. Several, actually, a plain, a pumpkin, an eggnog flavored one… I make apple dumplings and several breads and cookies and… lots of stuff.
I also cook, although I’m a recipe based cook and always envy the people (like one of my ex-girlfriends) who can look at a mostly-empty cupboard and figure out how to whip together something that will taste fabulous over pasta.
But yes, I guess now that I need to stop making french toast and pancakes, stop getting coffee for my girlfriend in the morning. I guess she and I should work side by side in the kitchen each day making our own food and heaven forbid we share even a bite with the other, that’s oppressive and misogynistic.
Free: You and I should get together sometime, you can make dinner, I’ll make dessert. We can find some women to oppress with our food. 😉
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Hi Master Beta, with regards to your points:
A. Yes, I agree lefties tend to be younger than conservatives. As a middle aged far-left bloke (I identify as an anarchist), this is definitely true. I joke with my friends that ‘I used to believe in freedom until the weight of the world killed my spirit’ but in all honesty, it does actually ring true. Look at what happened to the hippies – they all grew up and turned into the generation that gave us the economic mess we live in today.
B. I don’t know which country you live in, so I can only give you my own perspective of living in Australia (aka the best place in the world to live) and yeah, we do have fatties, but a lot of older people I know, whilst they aren’t the svelt spunky people they were when they were younger, aren’t fat.
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I need to prove that the labyrinthine beauracracy that is our healthcare system was created by the government?
You can’t possibly….
Okay, how’s this?
78% of healthcare spending in America today passes through the government in some way or another.
Find me another industry where that is the case.
Find me another industry that has created such a labyrintine bureaucracy on its own, without government intervention.
I’ll wait here…
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Well explained. A good explanation for why I don’t think LostSailor is a liberal at all.
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You lost sight of that because of the faith in government that you must have to follow your world view.
It’s obvious that a) JB’s blog isn’t the right venue for what would be a long, involved conversation and b) it’s unlikely that a conversation between us would be a fruitful endeavor. You have repeatedly ascribed positions, values, and “world views” to me that I do not hold. You have rather rudely implied that I haven’t done any research or can’t know what I’m talking about because I don’t agree with you. And you have angrily made unsupported assertions that would require far too much time and energy than I care to spend to refute, especially here.
I don’t bear any ill-will here, but your rather heated rhetoric does not generally lend itself to reasoned debate. And so I’ll end this one here.
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Well, certainly not the cartoon version presented here.
And I am neither a libertarian (though I do share some views) nor a paleoconservative, though I have read Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver.
And what this all has to do with me getting a sandwich made for me, I’m not sure…
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Certainly. I’ve been perfecting a recipe I am planning on serving at my grandmother’s 100th b-day party. Its a Filet Mignon, stuffed with a spicy lobster cake, wrapped in thick sliced, smoked bacon and served with a Bourbon and Shiitake mushroom cream sauce.
Sadly I guess we’ll just have to have Kraft Dinner or the dry as fuck turkey my sister used to make before I took over family cooking.
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Oh my god
That’s beyond oppression
That’s bordering on outright slavery.
Sign me up!
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I have a great recipe for roasted tenderloin of beef encrusted with mustard sauce and fresh-grated horseradish.
I used to oppress wife and family with it for 20 years.
Given that a lot of the guys here cook and we know that nearly all the great chefs are men, I guess it’s proof that cooking food is a primary pillar of Patriarchy.
I see mandatory raw veganism in our future…
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I have been scrubbing sinks and toilets, keeping the linens on my bed clean, and preparing my own meals since before I hit puberty. Having a woman do all of these things for me is pure novelty.
A novelty I can do without, because I had to learn how to take care of myself and my surroundings at a young age when no one else was around. None of this gender binary/gender role nonsense. Some, if not, most of the best chefs in the world happen to be men. The fembots need to try that on for shoe size.
This is the problem with feminists. They think that women are doing men a favor by simply existing, and that men somehow need women to the point of “oppressing” them. It’s usually the strong, able-bodied, and capable, i.e. men, that are treated like slaves by society, by Big Brother, and by the “fairer sex”. I don’t know where feminists get the idea that making a sandwich for someone else, through your own volition, is degrading.
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And I forget to add tubs in the first sentence. I definitely know who to kill the grime that gets on the tub, and on and in between the surrounding walls and tiles. Fuck that shit…
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Just one note about the point you make in the wife-picking post: I think it’s possible for a woman to learn to care about feeding her guy, provided she’s capable about caring about anything with him. Clearly the Jezebel harpies aren’t capable of caring, period, but I know in my case, my mother was one of those 70s feminists who always treated it as a big hassle if she had to cook, so everyone just kinda fended for themselves food-wise and I never even thought about it until recently.
It was actually reading your blog that alerted me to the notion that guys will interpret offered food as a sign of love. Otherwise, I just assumed if someone was hungry, he’d get himself something or suggest ordering take-out.
So there’s hope on that front. I wonder how many other signals have started flying over the heads of younger women whose mothers threw the baby out with the bath water, and how many of us will manage to relearn these things.
Back to the post at hand: I think the whole thing’s kinda sweet, and good on her for paying attention and hearing what he was telling her instead of ignoring it or misinterpreting it. Seems a little weird and score-keeping to me to have a set number of sandwiches and fixate on it, but hey, it works for them. Screw the harpies.
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“Captain Capitalism has a theory that people whose political inclinations tend to lean left are less physically attractive than those who lean more to the right.”
Apparently Captain Capitalism has never set foot on a college campus.
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Libertarianism is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end. This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty, political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism.
Here is Stefan Molyneux explaining Libertarianism in a 15 minute video.
Semper Fidelis
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fortunately, college hotties turn into saggy-dugged, obese monsters a few years after leaving.
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Sometimes you need that tooth pick to get some of that love infused sandwich out of your rugged teeth. before you kiss the person who loved you the way they deserved.
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Notice: “ugly” equals “beautiful” on planet Feminism:
“Physical. Bitches are big, tall, strong, large, loud, brash, harsh, awkward, clumsy, sprawling, strident, ugly.”
A woman should be proud to declare she is a Bitch, because Bitch is Beautiful.
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It isn’t feminism.My boyfriend does almost all the cooking(sometimes I’m there too).It’s just very boring…I’m a person who would rather eat bread and yoghurt most of the times than cook for herself.Plus I need less food than him so me cooking would mean very little food.My mom always said no person would want to be with someone like me but I reminded her that my dad is exactly like me and she didn’t dump him.It’s funny that you think that a man doing that it’s a slave while a woman doing this it’s natural.5 years in his only complaint it’s that I should at least stop playing video games and stay with him -which I did.So when he cooks, I’m usually at the table reading a newspaper or a book.He did let me cook once but I chose to make cow stomach soup(I super love it, he hates it) and I borrowed a big pot from my mom to make sure it lasts us for days.The second time I made borsch but added vinegar(again my fav but too sour for him) and the third time eggplant salad(the paste kind) so he gave up and now he’s the cook in the house.
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Of course, you’re right, LostSailor, we’re going on here in someone else’s living room where the discussion isn’t really in topic at all. It’s rude, and to the extent that we’re still doing it, that’s pretty much my fault since you’ve tried to put an end to it at least once.
I only want to make one more point, and that point is this – you’ve accused me of being very angry about this subject, and I will admit that I am.
Liberals and conservatives both want a say in how I run my life and my affairs. They want to hold a gun to my head and MAKE me live my life they way they think I should, or else. Liberals are markedly worse about this even than conservatives are, and so when someone self-identifies as one, I challenge that. (When someone self-identifies as a conservative, I challenge them, too, so don’t feel like you’re getting special treatment).
You are not a liberal. You can claim my definition of liberal is “cartoon” or whatever, but the definition is the definition. You say “I’m a liberal, but I don’t believe in the things liberals believe in, and I don’t do the things liberals do” and the fact is, you aren’t one, then. Being a liberal, by definition, requires that you have a certain set of beliefs, including top-down command and control of all things economic, and also a long list of “thou shalt nots” encoded into law making it more difficult for my brethren and I to make our living and our mark, all the while using that new found, top-down command power to build a long list of corporate cronies who you help run roughshod over all of us little folk out here.
I think the biggest thing that got me so hot under the collar is that I have a lot of respect for the things you say, because you tend to use good, solid logic in the things you write here, and when you told me that you were a liberal, a mental condition that damned near precludes logic, I was greatly disappointed.
But you are against all of the things that I listed – you are against cronyism, top down command and control, and only actually for the long list of “thou shalt nots” that I’m lamenting, and because of that, you simply aren’t the guy I’m ranting against. You said you were, then slowly told me you really weren’t. (as an aside, I still say that your list of “thou shalt nots” goes hand-in-hand with both top-down and cronyism, based on simple human nature, but that’s a topic for another day).
And with that, I’ll leave it alone. This was 100% a misunderstanding based on the fact that you think the definition of the word “liberal” is a fluid thing that means whatever you want it to mean, and I think it is based on what the dictionary says it is.
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And my point is that you don’t get to define “what liberals believe”.
Being a liberal, at its core, means working to change things you think could be better. Being a conservative, at its core, means sticking with what you have or going back to what you believe has been proven before.
The rest of this IS your cartoonish idea of what a liberal is, and you can hold it if you want, but it’s wrong.
If you want a perfect description of liberal vs conservative, listen to the old “American Top 40” radio show with Casey Kasem. He’d end the show each week with “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.”
Conservatives keep their feet on the ground. Liberals reach for the stars. You need some of both, either extreme without any of the other will be disastrous.
And by the way, who ever said that we shouldn’t have any rules as to how we should live? Your complaint isn’t about rules as to how you should live, it’s about which specific ones you disagree with. I would be surprised if you want to live in a world where murder is considered a viable option (to eliminate someone above you at your job, or to obtain a hot car your neighbor has, or whatever).
Any society has shared rules under which they live. You can dislike specific ones, but when you start trying to claim some universal dislike for ANY rules, you’re being disingenuous.
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Yes, but if you do not recognize that there ARE reasonable limits on liberty, and that the debate isn’t “100% freedom or nothing”, you’re fooling yourself.
You do not have the liberty to kill me. You may wish to, but your liberty to do so is infringed for the greater good of a society that judges everyone’s right to be reasonably free from being murdered outweighs everyone’s right to kill those with whom they disagree and who stand in their way.
The truth is, the debate isn’t between whether we should be 100% free or not, it’s over where we draw the line. In my view, MANY (certainly not all) libertarians have lost sight of that fact, and feel that their personal freedom should never be infringed at all, even when that freedom would allow them (and others) to infringe upon some else’s rights.
And yes, laws are an imperfect way of enforcing those rules. So what? Antibiotics are an imperfect way of treating infections, but in the absence of a better option, we take it.
The problem with any philosophy is the radical conclusion, but I see far more loudly vocal libertarians advocating near anarchy than I do self-described liberals advocating communism.
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She doesn’t even have to make food, really. Just prove she can recognize:
1. A joke, when she hears one
2. A joke that’s totally a joke and also, at the same time, kinda not really a joke at all. (In tech, we call this “Ha Ha, Only Serious”.)
Stephanie Smith, I am quite sure, got the joke. And now her fiance-to-be is sitting back, thinking “hey, I never thought she’d take this whole ‘more sandwiches’ thing and run with it as far and as fast as she has, but now that it’s an official thing, that’s pretty cool…maybe we _should_ get married after all…I could do a lot worse than the kind of girl who embraces this…like, say, any other woman I’ve ever known.”
It’s not about the sandwiches. Even at the moment the dude made his flip comment that launched all this brouhaha, I am prepared to bet money I couldn’t afford to lose that it was, at _most_, 10% about the sandwiches. By now, he might well be sick of sandwiches. But sandwiches aren’t the point. Indeed, _food_ isn’t the point.
Being a person who’s willing to do something like this, in public, just to prove what kind of person they are, and to stick with it beyond the point where it stops being funny (like when she starts getting attacked by the radical-feminist brigades, for example), all the way back to the top of the cycle where it turns funny all over again? Yeah…THAT is the point.
Good for Ms. Smith. Her guy is a lucky man.
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I think they may have just taken it more literally that you did.
You though of it in terms of “Taking time out of your day to do something nice for the person you love”, while they interpreted it as a sort of cold, formal financial transaction: “Get points by performing manual labor and earn fabulous prices!”
“Make enough sandwiches and I’ll marry you.”, when interpreted that way, is no different than “Take out the garbage and clean the gutters to earn sex from me.”.
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Lefty here (i support free healthcare, free university education and UBI (some market reasons mixed in there but still), but then i’m swedish) and i hit the gym 3 times a week.
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The fact that every dish you had previously prepared for the both of you were foods that only you liked should be a hint to the type of personality you really possess…. me. me. me. me. me. You even mentioned how the portions you cooked would be too small for him, indicating that you were cooking with only yourself in mind.
Then Western women wonder why mail-order brides are fast increasing in popularity?
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Funny, but also meh… I’m completely over the left/right BS, it’s a false dichotomy imho. Oh, and seriously, as far as appearance and makeup, that’s so a personal taste thing. As such, there can be no real means of judging peoples self-care regimens by means of not liking their style.
Seriously, do you have any idea how much effort and physical pain (not to mention itchiness and discomfort) goes into a full head of dreadlocks? Worse still, a dreadlock-mohawk? In those cases, you both have to shave with painstaking accuracy and delicacy, AND rub wax into what is basically something the texture of hairy string. For real, that shit builds callus. Oh, and shampoo and conditioner would totally kill your dreads, so no washing, not ever… No matter how much it feels like your naked scalp is inside a hessian sack.
Sometimes honesty is also funny as fuck :p
Seriously, if you could hear the bitchiness ferals and goths (I’d like to say just the girls, but, well…) spew about each other’s appearance, well, you’d think they were normal, human women… :p
Also, once you get past the judgefest (Or even include it) involved in making food for a hard-left gathering, wherein there must be no meat, and no judging of, but catering towards the vegetarian/vegan divide, there’s a shit-ton of effort right there. As a man who likes to eat omnivorously because, well, I just fucking do, I’ve still thoroughly enjoyed their food. Some make good food.
Still, I’ve probably never met, or never been in the same room for long with the particular people you’re talking about. Mostly because, as a rape-survivor (stop holding your breath people, it’s not going anywhere you’d expect) I love rape jokes. Fucking love them. The best humor comes from the heart, and a place of understanding.
So, next time you wanna be funny while giving shit to hippies, live with ’em for a while. They often display remarkably human-like qualities most of the time. Fuck, I’d have been dead from starvation due to my own stupidity many times over, not to mention homeless and without sexual comfort if it weren’t for hippies, ferals, goths and other loony-lefties. Which I why I can rip nine colours of shit out of them humor-wise…
Remember, Colbert wouldn’t be funny if he didn’t watch so damn much FOX :p
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