When I was in college, I took a Japanese Tea Ceremony class. The instructor was a man who came from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, a man who could have been bitter and angry, but instead saw great worth in what the United States stood for. In spite of past injustice, he was a patriot in support of the US.
I see the same thing in George Takei.
More like this, please.
George Takei, on Twitter:
A Democrat was in the White House when my family was sent to the internment camps in 1941. It was an egregious violation of our human and civil rights.
It would have been understandable if people like me said they’d never vote for a Democrat again, given what had been done to us.
But being a liberal, being a progressive, means being able to look past my own grievances and concerns and think of the greater good.
It means working from within the Democratic party to make it better, even when it has betrayed its values. I went on to campaign for Adlai Stevenson when I became an adult.
I marched for civil rights and had the honor of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King. I fought for redress for my community and have spent my life ensuring that America understood that we could not betray our Constitution in such a way ever again.
Bill Clinton broke my heart when he signed DOMA into law. It was a slap in the face to the LGBTQ community. And I knew that we still had much work to do. But I voted for him again in 1996 despite my misgivings, because the alternative was far worse.
And my obligation as a citizen was to help choose the best leader for it, not to check out by not voting out of anger or protest.
There is no leader who will make the decision you want her or him to make 100 percent of the time.
Your vote is a tool of hope for a better world.
Use it wisely, for it is precious.
Use it for others, for they are in need of your support, too.
Totally open thread.
Old School
But what if the Democrat is old?
trollhattan
@Old School: Did you know in kilometers Biden is 133?
Old Man Shadow
George Takei is a delight.
MomSense
It is so nice to read a mature vision of citizenship.
Splitting Image
It was quite some years ago that I began to think of Star Trek mainly as the vehicle that propelled Takei to his eventual internet fame.
He’s a good’un.
teezyskeezy
Well he didn’t grow up in the age of Tik Tok influencers, so what does he know about performative, grandiose petulance? Oh wait…Nevermind. He’s seen that before. My mistake.
Crimson Pimpernel
Takei is impressive in his ability to get past bitterness and use his terrible experience as a vehicle for learning and working toward a better world. More like this, indeed.
cain
Glad you’re at the helm, Mr. Sulu.
Lyrebird
Thank you WG for your unflagging work fostering constructive action!
Here is good news from an unlikely source: I get email spam for some reason for training classes for HR managers. Never been an HR manager, but whatevs. Today’s ad talks about how the DoL is really stepping up and has brought more investigators on board… employers are losing millions in wage and hours suits… so sign up for our webinar thing yadda yadda yadda. Sounds to me like good things are happening!
HumboldtBlue
George has always been class, through and through.
Speaking of class, the editorial board at the Washington Post needs to go back to logic class, because this absolute mess of an editorial on the growing political divide and how it may impact relationships and marriage is hot garbage, as Dartagnan at Daily Kos points out so thoroughly.
Frankensteinbeck
@teezyskeezy:
Is that a William Shatner joke? Because boy, I hear that’s a big part of his personality. Stories out of the rest of the cast are that he’s an unpleasant person.
WaterGirl
Sometimes I wonder if, by frequently mentioning the Biden is old thing, we are contributing to the “biden is old” chatter, even as we mock it.
teezyskeezy
@Frankensteinbeck: YES…it…IS!
Dan B
We have a number of friends and in-laws who were incarcerated as children. A couple of in-law couples went to Idaho to revisit the camp and had a blowout on the freeway in Oregon on the way back. It made the whole tragedy current.
George Takei being gay brings his example even closer. The other night we watched Rustin, a Netflix drama about the primary organizer of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, an openly gay man. In today’s Seattle Times there’s a review of the movie praising Rustin’s struggle by Naomi Ishisaka. Minority groups are easily divided and allies silenced but when we throw off the ‘us versus them’ shackles we advance.
WaterGirl
@Lyrebird: Thank you! We can’t let the bastards get us down.
Baud
Sulu is god.
@HumboldtBlue:
Dafaq?
The question is, why has it taken so long for this to happen?
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Biden himself has been mocking it recently.
cain
@HumboldtBlue: conservative men’s libido is going to be the affected.
Imagine if women start leaving for blue states – that should be fun.
ETA edited.
WaterGirl
@HumboldtBlue:
It should be conveying that would-be suitors who are Republican might just end up old and alone because most thinking women reject someone who wants to control them.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
@Baud:
To add, your concern is a legitimate one. People do have a tendency to get wrapped up in the mockery and forget the purpose of it. Happens a lot with parody Twitter accounts IMHO.
HumboldtBlue
@Baud:
The entire piece is a mess.
WaterGirl
@Baud: And fairly effectively!
But if someone could measure the frequency of “Biden is old” on the internet, I wouldn’t be surprised if our side didn’t make up at least half of those instances.
So I wonder about the ripple effect.
Dan B
@Splitting Image: Gene Roddenberry had to persuade Nichelle Norris to stay on. The quote attributed to Roddenberry is, “Don’t you see what I’m doing?” The entire premise was we’d all have struggles with our different identities but we’d grow out of tribalism and the benefits would take us to the stars.
cain
@WaterGirl: Don’t worry there will be a “Defense of American Libido Act” – telling women that they cannot leave the state and that Republican men take priority as they are the true Americans.
Chris
Takei came and spoke at my grad school about a decade ago, largely about his life experiences. There’s something spectacular about the story of a man who’s traveled from the days of being interned along with his family for nothing but their ethnic background, and coming from that level of intolerance to a world where his marriage to a man is legally recognized.
Miss Bianca
@HumboldtBlue: Jesus. I just can’t even…Jesus, I can’t even “can’t even” with this one.
@WaterGirl: You said it.
RepubAnon
@WaterGirl: That’s it – if Republican men don’t understand why they can’t get dates from sensible women, they should stop acting like the man in Waylon Jennings w. Friends – Put Another Log on the Fire
Baud
@cain:
Demanding Involuntary Coitus and Kissing Act.
Chris
@Old School:
Heck, imagine if we voted for a President who was so determined to stay in office he eventually died there after twelve years.
Boy, we wouldn’t want a President like that.
Hungry Joe
One of my college roommates approved (tongue-in-cheek) of the interment of Japanese-Americans during WWII: His parents, who were from different parts of California, met in one of the camps.
Lyrebird
@HumboldtBlue: Agreed! I thought Dartagnan did a pretty good job of it, but still wanted to take out my own red pen… the op ed makes some kind of glancing mention of Roe v Wade… like I wanna marry some guy who is so unwilling to admit knowing nothing about human reproduction that he thinks an ectopic “pregnancy” is something I should volunteer to die for? Yes indeed there are die hard (so appropriate!) women in the reich wing, too, but I reckon more women than men know about stuff like gee bad things happen when you drive out “lady doctors” and consider individual women’s reproductive capacity or even their lives to be expendable.
I already hate this “oh woe, look, polarization!” stuff when it is used to cover for one side’s descent into fascism, and singing that tune with another scolding for terrible picky liberal women is the sh-t icing on the sh-t cake.
trollhattan
Did Liz Truss emigrate to New Zealand?
“To you future five-thousand dead, fuck you. To the rest of you hey, TAX CUTS!”
In a cute Kiwi accent.
Dan B
@WaterGirl: The “end of martiage!!” is recycled from “Gay marriage!!!” will destroy marriage. Part of the fear is that many heterosexuals can’t imagine a marriage where both partners are equal. In the 70’s many of us were asked, “Who’s the woman?” The question was based on the belief that someone had to be submissive for there to be order. Of the LGBT couples I’ve known over the decades there might be 5% who have a butch / fem dynamic. Everyone else assumes that equality is obvious.
HumboldtBlue
@Lyrebird:
A-fucking-men.
Dan B
@Baud: Nice DICKS!
WaterGirl
@Dan B: Truth.
Marmot
@cain: You know it’s basically a rural-urban divide, the whole politics thing, right?
Suzanne
@HumboldtBlue: I read that piece, and my reaction was, “So what?”. If dudes wanna get married to liberal women so badly, and they feel rejected, they can become liberal.
NotMax
@Baud
Make America F*ck Again?
Hob
A Facebook ad just tried to interest me in a new publication called Liberties, a “journal of culture and politics … a triumph for freedom of thought. Subscribe today for insight, cultural exploration and intellectual delight.” Over an animation of classy swirling lines that I guess represent delightfully free thoughts, the ad presents some pretty amazing quotes:
“A meteor of intellectual substance”— Thomas Friedman
“Invaluable”— David Brooks
It’d be hard to think of anyone less substantial than Friedman, but the Brooks one manages to be even funnier than that with just a single word, since Brooks is a guy who—on one of the few occasions when he ever actually made a clear statement of fact—famously lied about the prices of things.
The third pull-quote was from Cynthia Ozick, saying just “immaculate prose…” If I were Ozick I’d be pretty unhappy about being the third person in that list.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@HumboldtBlue: Let me guess. The people who should change their behavior are the women, not the men.
HumboldtBlue
@NotMax:
Da-dum-tssh!
Dan B
@trollhattan: This Tobacco restoration has been compared to the 35,000* deaths in the US from guns. Leading cause of death among young people.
*I thought it was 80,000 but that may be including suicides.
HumboldtBlue
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Now here you go being all smart and sassy, a classic example!
Chris
@HumboldtBlue:
In a world where we’re constantly told about how belittled, forgotten, and overlooked the average Republican voter is by the “cultural elites,” the reality is that they’re in fact so spoiled and overindulged that one of the leading papers in the nation is literally writing an entire article to beg people to sleep with them. This is a thing that actually appeared in print, written by and on behalf of what are supposed to be grown-ass men.
Seriously, WTF? I’m single. I’m sad about it sometimes. Where the fuck’s my Washington Post article begging the women of the nation to please sleep with me and predicting the end of marriage as an institution if they don’t?
Dan B
@Dorothy A. Winsor: How’d you guess?
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Denny Crane.
Ohio Mom
@Hungry Joe: Likewise, my mother’s cousin Sam met his beloved wife Sarah in an internment camp, a Displaced Person’s camp somewhere in Europe after World War II/ the Holocaust.
Then my grandmother sponsored them to immigrate to New York.
Baud
Republican heterosexual sex is the only thing keeping a lid on the Yellowstone supervolcano.
The world is counting on you, liberal ladies.
Martin
@HumboldtBlue: Shit, this has been the case pretty much since 2016, at least among young women. It’s at least a factor in the ‘loneliness of young men’ headlines, which has the unfortunate effect of driving at least some young men harder toward the GOP because they’d rather have their grievances affirmed than actually address why they are struggling to find a partner, etc.
My daughter has said she’d date a liberal woman before she’d ever date a conservative guy, and she’s said that pretty much all of her friends are the same way. I don’t suggest that they are representative, but when the GOP feels like an existential threat to your existence, it’s pretty hard to internally reconcile the act of dating them.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: It’s not the greatest political motivator– a popular refrain among these people is already “I tried becoming a feminist but the women still wouldn’t put out, so why bother?” I have my doubts about how feminist they ever were…
Suzanne
@Chris: It blows my mind.
Like, if one is having a hard time meeting people, does it never occur to conservative men to work on themselves?! Not just the superficial stuff like the gym, clothes, and grooming, but also the deeper stuff….. education, maybe therapy, meaningful hobbies and passions. Is self-improvement to find a partner a woman-coded thing? That just blows my mind.
Martin
@Suzanne: or a spree shooter.
Ohio Mom
@HumboldtBlue: I took a look at the comments on that editorial. At least the most-liked ones are scathing. The commentstors aren’t buying any of it.
Antonius
@Dan B: In fact, Dr. Martin Luther King personally persuaded Nichelle Nichols to remain on Star Trek:
Back in 2010, during an interview with StarTrek.com, Nichols recounted how Dr. King inspired her and how she’d inspired him and his family, and why she chose to heed his personal request to remain with Star Trek: The Original Series.
“When I told Gene [Roddenberry], I walked away, and as far as I was concerned it was a fait accompli,” she said. “Remember, I grew up in musical theater. I belonged to the theater, not to television or movies. Those were things I did when I hadn’t quite made it where I wanted to go, but was on my way. I had quite a lot going for me. I had no idea of the power of being on a screen and people seeing you weekly. But I was ready to go. As nice as this little part was, and I loved the people and I loved working on it, and I was getting experience in a new medium, I didn’t think twice about [leaving].”
https://www.startrek.com/news/nichelle-nichols-remembers-dr-king
H.E.Wolf
@Dan B:
Nichelle Nichols (may she rest in peace and power).
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Those are absolutely the men who should absolutely not reproduce and their sexual frustration is actually a gift for humanity.
M31
lololol, you mean something that flames out in the atmosphere and disintegrates before it even hits the ground?
sounds substantive to me
the fried man never fails to hit the metaphor straight on his thumb, it’s actually an amazing ‘talent’
Suzanne
I will also note that the Washington Post ran a piece today about Doritos inventing a microphone silencer so gamers can crunch Doritos while using their headsets without disrupting others, and why the fuck are so many men still single?! I can’t figure it out.
Chris
@Martin:
The thing is, though, last time I checked, the majority of people when asked “would you date somebody from outside your political party” still said “yes.” And in many cases there’s a self-sorting effect because most of the people around you vote the same way you do in the first place, so the issue won’t come up that much in the first place. Most people are just not that political in the first place, not to mention that half the country doesn’t even vote in the first place.
This can’t possibly be a major issue for most people, even most Republicans. If you’re a Republican who literally can’t get a date, yeah, maybe you’re in a very specific environment, but much more likely is that you’re just so blatantly a misogynistic creep that you’d be turning most women off even if the topic of politics never came up.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne: And like, what…there just aren’t enough “conservative” women to go around for these guys? Huh.
Old School
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne: No it doesn’t, because they’re entitled to all that and more, doncha you know. So it obviously has nothing to do with them. Consequently it must be a conspiracy against them and someone must pay.
Baud
@Miss Bianca:
Maybe they want good looking women.
Baud
@Chris:
Agreed. Probably a DC problem, which is why the Post is concerned.
eclare
@Old School:
Thanks for the notice.
Martin
@Suzanne: So, one of the theses explaining this behavior that rings pretty true to me is that these representations of manhood that are directed at young men (and I don’t diminish that the same phenomenon happens to other groups, but they are more practiced at dealing with this than men are) are pretty much straight up lies – in terms of landing the job that will secure your future, and finding the perfect partner, fantasies of social admiration through some act of courageous violence, and all that garbage. And when you start to wake up to the fact that the world doesn’t work like that you have a choice – you can either acknowledge that you were lied to and turn left, and engage with the world as it is, or you can say ‘I was promised this’ and then demand it through other means – usually some form of violence – be it harassing behavior or an AR-15 or becoming a fascist.
So yeah, you could work on yourself, or you can buy into the right-to-rape movement. And thankfully not a LOT of people do the latter, but any people doing the latter is too many. This isn’t a problem for women to solve, you have to go back to the root of the problem and fix it there – to the lies directed to men, usually to recruit them into a political cause, which sets this whole thing off.
And I don’t think this is all that different from pastors (and Fox News, and various politicians) who promise their congregation that this is a fundamentally christian nation (in policy, not culture) and when they see their political power waning make the same determination and swing toward radicalization and violence. I mean, there were a LOT of christian nationalist flags flying on Jan 6. You don’t get these people out of that trap by appealing them to secular humanism. It takes a lot more work than that, because they’ve long passed the fork in the road where it would have been pretty easy, and they’re now miles away.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: Gene “casting couch” Roddenberry was no prize either.
Chris
@Baud:
Not necessarily DC specifically, but the kind of environment that embodies, yeah.
I suspect the kind of environment where this might be a problem is “a social circle where people are unusually politically active and aware, where most people are liberal and most women even more so, and also where young conservatives wear their Trumpiness on their sleeves and can’t shut up about it to a degree that would make it hard for the women to ignore it even if they wanted to.” Which is, indeed, probably the kind of environment that’s familiar to Washington Post and New York Times pundits and those working directly below them.
But I seriously doubt if a truck driver and a bank cashier going on a date are either talking or caring much about each other’s politics, whether in Abilene or in South Central LA.
Miss Bianca
@Baud: I did hear from a source who self-identifies as a Libertarian that supposedly we liberal ladies are considered by the conservative male demographic as hotter – read, “friskier in the sack” – as a rule, than conservative ones.
Anecdatum, FWIW ; )
trollhattan
@M31: “Or he will be, in six months!”
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: I’m married to another Democrat, but a lot of non-jerks in this state are registered as Independents (it lets you vote in either primary so why not), so if I were single that wouldn’t hypothetically be a deal-breaker.
scav
They’re really gunning and doubling down on the Anti-choice platform vis-á-vis women. Not only going after contraception after taking out Roe, but now the wimminz must learn that all offers of marriage, dating or under-the-bleachers furtive or violent sex are to be acceded to immediately. There are no choices. None of this No means No nonsense from the XX-chattel.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
I honestly could never picture dating a Republican, but I’m also still pretty firmly in the minority, and it’s unlikely to be an issue in any case as most of the people I know are firm Democrats.
(As a male my general rule is also “hey, if I’m going to write off half the nation’s women on account of their politics, it’s only logical that some of them should do the same to half the nation’s men.” But I’m aware that’s a view that’s not, well, unanimous among people of the male persuasion).
Doc Sportello
@teezyskeezy: So good ….
NotMax
Just for funsies, watch as Mr. Takei masticates the scenery.
:)
There go two miscreants
@Hob: The full quote was probably something like: “You can dress crap up in immaculate prose, but it’s still crap.”
geg6
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
DING! DING! DING!
Tony Jay
Way to miss the point, Wokey Jokeys. Conservatives are Real Men. Weathered, leathery, almost upholstered. Their scent is a rasp of desert heat and forest sap. When born their hands are already reaching for weapons and their every night emission is a warrior wasted. If Liberal women are so deluded they won’t host the seed of these mighty steeds they’re as good as dooming the country to a future of weedy, weak book-boys and inevitable foreign conquest.
It’s like you don’t even understand natural selection.
Doc Sportello
@Old Man Shadow: I recognize your “delight” but will raise to “national treasure.”
Him and Dolly, baby.
Scout211
They should go check out their nearest coven for an old fashioned covenant marriage just like MAGA Mike and his coven bride have.
What?
JaySinWA
To be fair, some of them went to PUA (pick up artist) schools. It didn’t seem to have worked and so we saw the rise of the Incels as they gave up. Give up misogyny? Never.
Dan B
@Baud: Rotating tag nominee!
geg6
@Suzanne:
That is fucking hilarious.
Personally, if I was a young woman again, if a guy told me he was a gamer, I’d run away just as fast as if he was conservative asshole. Based on the gamers I’ve met IRL, “gamer” is synonymous with “conservative asshole.”
Jackie
@Suzanne: I had to look it up in disbelief:
Gift link: https://wapo.st/47wJeiv
Ladyraxterinok
@HumboldtBlue:
I gor married in 1965. NO WAY would I have married a Republican :-)
Could not then and can not now imagine living with someone who didn’t/doesn’t have similar views on politics, religion childrearing, life goals, etc. (Yeah things can change —-so divorce)
In the 70s and 80s our son would often ask ‘Don’t you guys EVER win?”
Hoppie
I had the great privilege to meet Takei at Octocon in Santa Rosa in the eighties. At the time he was on the board of the subway construction agency in LA, and we talked trains! I believe he enjoyed not being Sulu for a little while. A class act.
Frankensteinbeck
@Hob:
That was hilarious. I mean, he did state the correct total cost. He left out it was for a $17 burger and $60 worth of alcohol. The mockery he got was absolutely choice. Some great memes.
@Baud:
Good point, because it famously is a DC problem. Young Republican staffers bitch regularly and loudly to the press that they cannot get a date in that liberal city. The women want nothing to do with them.
There’s a whole phenomenon going on around the country, but yeah, it’s a big thing in DC and that might affect the Washington Post’s coverage.
Matt McIrvin
@JaySinWA: Yeah, my impression was that the original core of the “incel” movement was kids who had been suckered by PUA con-men, were angry and came away with the wrong lesson from that.
Chris
@Ladyraxterinok:
I always figured in those days, cross-partisan divides would muddle everything, even if the rules still applied.
“Daddy, can I date a Republican?”
“Sure, probably. He supported Nelson Rockefeller, right?”
“No, Barry Goldwater.”
“Oh hell no.”
“… Daddy, this one’s a Democrat, can I date a Democrat?”
“Did he support LBJ?”
“George Wallace.”
“Oh HELL no.”
Princess
@trollhattan: But in Celsius, Biden is a sprightly 27!
Doc Sardonic
@Miss Bianca: The conservative women don’t want them either, because most conservative men believe their cocks are community property and have this problem with that quaint notion of fidelity.
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: OK, I am simultaneously laughing and gagging. THANKS, TONY JAY!
Remind me to do *you* a favor one of these days!
Baud
@Princess:
For the love of God, don’t do it on Kelvin.
Ksmiami
@Suzanne: lol. Beer gut, misogyny and Doritos breath just isn’t that appealing- who knew?
Martin
@Chris: I think that’s a polling effect. The ‘would you date someone from outside your political party’ is too close to the question of ‘would you date someone from outside your race’ or ‘outside your religion’. It’s going to be interpreted by most people as a question of whether they are a bigot or not. And even bigots are usually self-aware enough to know that being a bigot is bad. So they answer as they want to be seen, not necessarily as they are, even on an anonymous survey. We’re all pretty practiced at the task of identifying ‘what is the correct answer here’, which is not the same thing as what the honest answer is. And the correct answer is to be openminded. I’ll consider dating anyone.
So, when you put questions like that on surveys, you have to assume there will be at least some drift toward the ‘correct’ cultural answer. And there are ways to account for that – usually with more direct questions around policy, etc. things that have more direct material effect on their lives, where the ‘correct’ answer looks very different. ‘Would you date someone who oppose all forms of abortion’, that kind of thing. Because that’s not a ‘are you a bigot’ question, that’s a ‘what are your views on women’s health’ question.
The polling on ‘would you date someone of a different race’ is and has been quite high. Go look at interracial marriage rates. See how that expression of ‘yes, I’m not a bigot, I’m openminded’ lands in practice. And I don’t mean to suggest that people are necessarily lying here, but if your social circles where you find dates are homogeneous, then the ‘would you date’ question is a hypothetical, and a lot of respondents are genuinely unsure whether they would. They want to think they would, but until the opportunity arises, they don’t really know. And for a lot of people, that opportunity never arises, it never gets tested, so we don’t really know. It’s part a question of experience and a part a question of whether people are aware of the culturally correct answer.
When your wife asks ‘would you fight off a wolf to save me’, your answer better be ‘yes’, but nobody knows for real whether they would or not until it happens. I would like to think I would, but I have no idea. I have surprised myself with acts of courage I probably couldn’t have predicted, and I’ve recoiled from situations that I previously thought I would have run into. My internal representation of self is, well, not accurate. It is aspirational, and I think that’s pretty normal. And polling sometimes gets that aspirational representation of self, and sometimes get the accurate one. So when you design polls (and I’ve done a decent bit of this in my career) you need to be cognizant of this phenomenon and be clever about how you structure polls.
But to the issue, part of the problem is that historically the political gender gap was pretty small – single digits. So whether or not people were willing to date outside of their party was fairly immaterial, there were enough dating opportunities within the party. But it’s now it’s pushing 15 points (as of 2020). It’s now a structural problem and you need a larger degree of partisan crossover to balance the equation than prior to 2020. And I imagine that’s a LOT worse now after Dobbs. So even if attitudes about crossing over haven’t changed, the demographics of the parties have stratified to a much greater degree on gender, and that requires a higher degree of crossover.
Martin
@Chris: The solution is pretty simple – if the GOP has an overabundance of lonely men, they’re welcome to sleep with each other. Why is this option never suggested?
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Again, though, I can see where it’s a problem that it wouldn’t be for most normal people, but even there I seriously question the extent of it.
The fact is, there are a lot of Republicans in DC, and a lot of them are women! And they’ve got their nice little parallel universes all set up, from campus political movements to conservative churches to various professional organizations destined to help young people move up into the world of Republican politics. It cannot possibly be that hard for young Republican staffers to get a date. Certainly most of the College Republicans I knew at AU had no problem finding girlfriends.
I suspect the problem is massively blown out of proportion by assholes who can’t deal with even one rejection, and/or people who simply need something to bitch about and blame liberals for in every aspect of their life.
sab
@Tony Jay: I am guessing that you know a lot of Chuck Norris jokes.
OT My husband had a weird but hilarious dream in which I was a standup comic ( !!!?) on some late night television show telling cat jokes that were just recycled Chuck Norris jokes with cats instead of Chuck Norris. Husband in the dream kept protesting that the jokes weren’t even original, but the audience continued to roar with laughter.
HumboldtBlue
@Miss Bianca:
That made me choke on my broccoli.
C Stars
So I know of two young men in my immediate circle who became right-wing Joe Rogan types in their teens. Both were somewhat femme-acting as younger kids and were bullied into submission and now act the part of the “alpha male” aggressor. Neither have girlfriends or seem to have any interest in having romantic relationships with women their age. The way I see it, the claim that you are being rejected for your politics may be an easy cover for some percentage of boys who aren’t interested in girls anyway and are painfully closeted.
Doc Sardonic
@Baud: Okay, my brain is not translating or my reading comprehension is on vacation. I read that as ‘don’t do it on KEVIN.’
Martin
Always omitted from this calculus is that DC is 45% black, and maybe that might be a factor in why these conservative men can’t find a date they find to be acceptable?
Another Scott
Yes, it’s an excellent post. Thanks.
Meanwhile, long live the Oxford comma – Whitehouse.gov:
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@Tony Jay:
Upholstered…with a rich, Corinthian leather.
Line from a Chysler ad spoken by Ricardo Montalban.
eclare
@Another Scott:
What? No MAGA stabby murder trees? The gall!
sab
@Martin: Repeating my comment line that we were not founded as a Christian nation, because our Founders had a kosher table for meals at the first Continental Congress and passed the First Amendment.
And if we hadn’t had a Revolution, New England would still be Congregational (UCC) and the South would still be Episcopalian, and Baptists and other Evangelicals (excepting Lutherans and Presbyterians) would be illegal everywhere.
Betty Cracker
@Princess: LMAO! Biden should use that!
Chris
@eclare:
Says a lot that this ad predates my birth by a solid decade at least and yet I still understand the reference. Now that’s successful advertising.
Ruckus
@Hungry Joe:
My next door neighbors growing up were a Japanese family with a daughter my age. The parents had been through that, we were both born just after WWII.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Chris: ah, but can you hear his voice ?
eclare
@Chris:
That is!
zhena gogolia
@MomSense: Yes, it’s so well phrased.
H.E.Wolf
Did not know that cool fact until today!
Roger Williams of Rhode Island would like a word. :-)
https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-05
CaseyL
@Chris:
Even if party politics doesn’t enter into a first (or subsequent) date conversations, there will be an abundance of clues as to each person’s political views if they ever talk about anything more substantive than what’s on the menu in front of them.
Frank Wilhoit
@Frankensteinbeck:
I once saw a clip of Patrick Stewart doing an interview for the release of Generations and being asked about Shatner. A flicker of pain crossed his face and he replied, “He is a piece of work, isn’t he?” But later they seem to have become genuine friends (…?)
Baud
@CaseyL:
Like the gun!
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Dan B: apparently Martin Luther King helped by advising her to stay on Star Trek
gwangung
There’s a reason why Uncle George in the Asian American community (and especially so in the film and theatre community).
H.E.Wolf
@H.E.Wolf:
Yay me! I fixed the data mice in my previous comment. :) Thank you sab for the cool fact about the Founders.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Antonius: you beat me to it. Must remember to fully read the thread before commenting!
Chris
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
Good God, yes. He’s got one of those voices you don’t forget. Like Sean Connery. Or Christopher Lloyd. Or… maybe, Bill… Shatner.
Suzanne
@Jackie: I am creative, but I could not have made this up.
WaterGirl
@Doc Sardonic: You are not alone! That was my first read, as well!
Martin
@C Stars: Was having a similar discussion with my daughter and a friend of hers last night. Her friend wasn’t convinced that another guy in the friend group was ace, based on some comments they made in jest, and I observed that based on the dynamics of that group, a young man proclaiming to be ace is EXTREMELY hard to do. There is no upside to that. He can expect nothing but bullying. And I think there’s a least a bit of a dynamic of young men being Andrew Tate followers because it’s a FANTASTIC cover for being gay, ace, etc. being accepted by certain male circles and not having to prove your heteronormity because it’s women’s fault I can’t get a date.
If you are brave enough to wade into these forums, there’s a LOT of homoerotic banter taking place there. And that’s not really anything new with guys or necessarily indicative that they aren’t straight, but it’s front of mind a LOT. Like, there’s a lot of people here that need to get in touch with their feelings a lot.
I don’t have a particularly good answer for why it seems we have backslid from a decade ago when millennial men weren’t exhibiting this behavior. #metoo has been pointed to as a social change that a reaction should be expected from, so maybe. I’ve mentioned the theory that a social contract with men has been broken because the contract was a lie to begin with, and maybe that’s one of those incremental things that hit a breaking point, but none of this really feels right. Maybe it’s just something to grift off of like crypto and that’s the whole explanation. Not sure.
Dan B
@Martin: I’ve often wondered about the excess men in China sleeping with each other solution but it seems the government’s response is more anti-gay crackdown. Authoritarians and extreme hierarchical ideology just double down on stricter laws and punishments. There’s gotta be some research on this.
coin operated
@Martin:
QFT…
WaterGirl
@Baud: LOL. Literally.
WaterGirl
@gwangung: Is part of your sentence missing?
sab
@gwangung: I think you forgot to type the verb in your comment.
WaterGirl
@Martin: You lost me at Ace. In the context of what you are talking about, I have no idea what Ace is.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Many men do not want to admit that they are sexist trash.
Many people my age – old fart – grew up in a sexist society – often a very sexist society. They never saw/recognized or respected women who could live without them. And now their world has and is getting smaller. I was lucky to have an older sister who thought that traditional womanhood was 10000% bullshit. She was one who helped break barriers. Taught at USC, owned her own business, won awards in her field and was a damn fine artist. A full life she lived. A great person, even if she did stab me with a fork once.
C Stars
@WaterGirl: Asexual=not interested in sexual relationships with others, at all.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: My sister stabbed me with a fork once, too. Mine was in the hand. You?
She also dug her thumbnail into my thumb so hard that I still have the scar.
edit: the thumbnail dig was deeper than the fork stabbing.
WaterGirl
@C Stars: Thank you. Now I can go back and read Martin’s comment!
edit: Now tell me who Andrew Tate is? :-)
Dan B
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: I remember that. MLK Jr. felt she had a huge influence on the broader American culture being on a huge platform like television.
Jay
@Martin:
It has been a “hobby horse” of the WaPo since TIFG’s Admin.
The loathsome Admin staff for TIFG self quarantined in a section of DC isolated from the city proper, and with a mostly male Admin, except for TIFG’s selected eye candy, there were few women.
So, few chances of socialization with the opposite sex.
Loathing for TIFG’s Admin and actions, also limited opportunities to socialize.
Toss in GamerGate, Me Too, etc,…….
C Stars
@WaterGirl: Ugh, god, DO NOT look into who Andrew Tate is. You are better off not knowing, I promise you a million times over.
sab
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: Then NASA stole her. They also stole our excellent statewide tv elementary school science teacher.
I had not realized until this year that she could also have made a career as a jazz singer with some great bands. A renaissance woman.
Suzanne
@geg6:
Mr. Suzanne is absolutely one of us, and he plays games. Loves them, in fact. I’ve bought him video game systems for his birthday, and he has an enviable setup of older systems in his office room. And yet, I don’t hear him describe himself as a “gamer” ever. He said, during GamerGate, that it became a weird identity term. Like, almost everybody plays video games, even if it’s just Solitaire on your phone. “Gamer” became a toxic term, very gate-keep-y.
I personally love the Mario and Zelda games, and I know countless people in our political side of the aisle that think video games are really fun….. and yet I agree that self-described “gamers” are assholes.
Jay
@Dan B:
male;female ratio in China
104.61 to 100
USA
100 to 98.16
Globally
101 to 100
C Stars
@Martin: Yes, crypto youtubers was the way in for one of these boys I’m talking about.
I’m sure it’s a mix of all of the above. And also I realize it’s problematic to assume anyone about a person’s sexuality/identity without them confirming it themselves. It’s just with these two teens it seems so very obvious. Also I can’t recall all the names now (other than Ali Alexander) but I do seem to remember that a number of young male luminaries of the trad/right movement have been revealed to be people who either have sex with men or send a lot of texts about it.
Baud
@Jay:
Huh? The US and most of the world aren’t majority female?
Tony Jay
@Miss Bianca:
Why Madam, I’ve come over all quite a’flustered. ;-)
@sab:
I’d guess that Chuck Norris emanates the aroma of damp denim and Preparation H. Never trust a man whose eyes are bigger than his chin.
@eclare:
Thanks to Family Guy I now hear all of Ricardo Montalban lines coming from the mouth of a dignified milk cow. It certainly makes The Wrath of Khan a whole different movie.
Jay
@WaterGirl:
Andrew Tate is a formerly “famous” online “Pick up Artist” and MMA Fighter who transitioned to human trafficking and sex slavery.
sab
@Tony Jay: His jokes do work with cats, but I have never told them.
” Cats can cure cancer with their tears, but cats never cry.
” Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.”
Jay
@Baud:
It’s more about the “surplus male” bs about China.
Just because there are 100 guys for every 100 women, doesn’t mean that there will be 100 pairings.
Some will be ACE, Bi, Trans, Gay, Kink, etc,….
And some will have “pull”, and some won’t.
When SWMBO and I did “our numbers”, they were vastly different.
Suzanne
@Martin:
What makes you think men weren’t exhibiting this behavior a decade ago? Or two decades ago? They absolutely were. It was just… more normal. So no one took notice.
Men are not doing as well relative to women in recent years w/r/t earnings, education, etc. This has been a thing that been shifting over years. It’s become more noticeable, but it’s a change in degree, not in kind.
The contract — the expected middle-class lifestyle, aka The American Dream — turned out to be harder than expected to access. (I think high housing costs weigh into this heavily, too, BTW.) The WaPo recently cited the statistic that, for people born in 1980 (me and Mr. Suzanne), only half of us will be as financially prosperous as our parents. The Boomers were much more successful relative to their parents than that. Millennials are totally fucked.
If they really want young people to marry and have kids….. forgive their student loans and make public higher education free. Build a shit-ton more houses. Stop saddling them with debts and burdens when they have to get started building a life. Most young people lead incredibly precarious lives financially.
WaterGirl
@C Stars: I will take your advice!
Sure Lurkalot
@Suzanne:
Ah, I see you and my 44 year old nephew have met. Suggest he peruse the offerings at a local community college to expand his non-existent interests or volunteer for some cause he might find worthy? Just pisses him off. Apparently, even the suggestion that he seek avenues for growth means he’s less than perfect and by extension, a woman won’t love him for who he is. It just goes round and round like that into infinity.
RSA
Regularly, when someone online describes a bad work situation that HR failed to resolve, I see people explaining, “HR is not on your side as an employee; HR is about protecting the company.” You’ve got some incontrovertible evidence in those ads.
Tony Jay
@sab:
“Why does Chuck Norris lick his own balls?” – “Because he can.”
Huh. Works with dog jokes too.
Jay
@Suzanne:
Don’t forget the Recessions. Each one for me, resulted in a major loss economically and a career change starting over from scratch.
Suzanne
@Sure Lurkalot: LMAO.
Not to laugh at your nephew, who I’m sure has some redeeming qualities. But, like….. of course no one loves us “for who we are”, if who we are is a lazy, grumpy, uninteresting lump.
Jay
@Tony Jay:
Isn’t the dog joke:
A) “I wish I could do that!”
B) “Give it a try, he doesn’t bite!”
NotMax
@eclare
We used to joke about an imagined line cut from those ads.
“Chrysler Cordoba. As good a car as I am an actor.”
;)
Tony Jay
@Jay:
“How do you know he doesn’t bite?”
sab
@Suzanne: Yes. I am upper middleclass because my grandparents were rich. I never had kids so I didn’t obsess with needing money because I never needed it. I already had enough. I disdn’t even need school loans and I have college and two graduate degrees without any debt.
Now I have stepkids who need more than I have. Basically for college or housing. Nowadays, even with small scale inherited money I can barely tip the iceberg of their quite reasonable needs. Tuition and some help on expenses.
Jay
@Tony Jay:
Uncle had a Lab that had distemper. Lost all his teeth as a pup. Never grew back.
Man, that dog, (poorly socialized) really wanted to bite everyone and everything, but could only gum you.
Suzanne
@Jay: Women were hit by the recessions, too. I think there was less social expectation for women to be breadwinners, though.
I have pointed out before…. everyone blah blah blahs and laments and writes Bruce Springsteen songs about manufacturing jobs going away, because men had those jobs. But when the “retail apocalypse” and self-checkout happened, and knocked out a lot of what used to be good sales jobs for women…. crickets. We don’t see that as a loss. Countless women supported families working in department stores, selling makeup and jewelry and clothes.
My MIL and FIL raised three boys in a house they purchased in Menlo Park, CA, in the early 80s. She worked as a cashier at Safeway once the kids were in school. He spent much of his career in regional sales, driving around. Neither ever finished college. That kind of lifestyle is utterly gone.
Tony Jay
@Jay:
And we’re back to Chuck Norris again.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne:
LOL, so true – just had to see that again!
Freemark
@Matt McIrvin:
I would say most people, even great ones, are no prize. Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, etc. I bet even Jonas Salk was a dick. I think we liberals have to understand that the same person can both be shitty and great.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Tony Jay:
Does your dog bite?
sab
@Tony Jay: Give it a try.
My dog is a girl dog, so she is by definition and inclination a bitch. She can take on anything except cats. The mean ones scare her, since they have claws that they use on her face.
dr. luba
Many years ago, I followed Takei somewhere–Facebook perhaps? When I first signed up to Twitter, I found him there and followed him. He had just joined, too, and sent me a gracious thank you message.
I have enjoyed his posts since. Such a gentle soul.
Kathleen
@WaterGirl: Since the media’s not so “sub”text is “Eeeeegads! Black Woman President”! I think an appropriate response to “Biden so old” is “Yes, and Kamala Harris is a Black woman.”
Subsole
@Chris:
The US Media has been sucking Nazi-adjacent Conservadick for so long, it just tastes like air to them.
WaterGirl
@Jay: I have never heard that followup!
cain
@Chris: well, you got your soros check, doncha? :-) /s
Jay
@Suzanne:
It was more about “the youtes” than gender.
My Dad graduated just after WWII, had two jobs in his life, both came with full COLA Pensions, and the only “scary” time was in the early 80’s when interest rates here hit 27%. “Luckily” he had no debt and the mortgage was paid.*
I have had 11 careers, 4 Recessions, been wiped out 3 times, unhoused twice.
When my Grandfather died, I learned that both my Dad and my Uncle had borrowed from the 1st National Bank of Grandad.
When my Dad died, I learned that my Brother had done the same.
I never knew that option was available.
ColoradoGuy
@Suzanne: Right on point. Get younger folks just a bit of financial relief, and the social lives of all of them, even the most repugnant gamers & MAGAs, will improve enormously.
Financial strain isn’t good for anyone’s sex life.
sab
@NotMax: Only problem is that I thought he was an excellent actor who never got the parts he was capable of. Who else could have made Wrath of Khan work, and Khan be justifiably intensely believably outraged for a whole movie?
WaterGirl
@Kathleen: Nodding my head. I am WaterGirl, and I approve that message. :-)
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Many men did not want a partner, they wanted a wife. Someone who cooked and cleaned up, did the shopping on a budget, and was subservient to them.
I think that WWII started the change to women becoming equals. They worked in factories building vehicles and weapons, and then assembling electronics in the early 50s. And that built up to a workforce that became a lot more diversified, in employees/employers and products/services.
Jay
@Tony Jay:
Pretty sure that Chuck Norris bites,
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/08/chuck-norris-challenges-obama-birth-certificate/
Chris
@Suzanne:
Not only is there less social expectation for them to be breadwinners, there’s social expectation for them not to be breadwinners, because that “emasculates” their men and isn’t “their proper place…” even as that makes it harder for the men to stay afloat economically, because that means all the breadwinning is on them… but they can’t accept any help with that burden from women, because that’s emasculating…
As with most of conservatism, this comes from a deep frustration with the fact that the world doesn’t work the way they were told it did, and refusal to adapt to it.
Chris
@ColoradoGuy:
But the incels don’t want that, and will furiously battle against any attempt to make that happen, because all that economic relief would go to people they see as “undeserving,” and would mean that you can do well in the world by being On Welfare rather than by going out and slaying the mammoth yourself personally and bringing home its meat for your tribe, or whatever.
Chris
@sab:
One of the joys of watching old shows from the sixties and seventies – Mission: Impossible, The Wild Wild West, Columbo – is that there’s almost inevitably The Ricardo Montalban episode. And he’s never more than a villain of the week, but he always makes the role memorable in a way that 90% of the villains of the week never are.
He did eventually get his own TV show, so there’s that, but still.
Kathleen
@WaterGirl: Thumbs up emoji!
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
As I’ve stated here before, I live in a +55 yrs old apt complex. Many of us are in our 70s or older, well over 3/4. The oldest that I know is 97. There are more than a couple of women who are 97, and several in their 90s. There may be some older than 97 but I don’t know of them. Fewer men in their 90s, men don’t seem to live as long.
Lapassionara
@Suzanne: I’m from the so-called silent generation. The year I graduated from college, corporate recruiters were regularly on campus, signing up the men who were graduating. The women had to make their own way, however, and those of us who delayed marriage had to fend for ourselves. I bumped around from subsistence jobs to graduate school, back to subsistence jobs. In the first few years, there were no general credit cards for people in my situation. There were department store credit cards, but if I wanted to spend money at a restaurant, I had to pay cash. I had a host of friends in the same situation, but no one thought to call attention to the kind of life we were living or to admonish us for falling short of the American dream. We were expected to keep working, keep paying our bills, and keep out of trouble.
I did not feel bad about my life, even though by today’s standards I was poor, because I had good friends who were married and had children, and I knew that they had problems too. The biggest plus I had at that time, that today’s young college graduates do not have, was an affordable college education. If we could solve that problem, I think a lot of the other problems could be minimized.
Jay
@Suzanne:
BTW, here, in addition to the Reagan Recession, Retail workers here got hit by the “tiers”.
Most Retail jobs were either Union, or Union free riders.
The jobs paid a living wage, pensions, etc.
The “tiers” were agreements between the Unions and the Employers, that to protect their jobs and benefits, new employee’s would start at minimum wage, some minor benefits, no pension, just a RRSP (401k in the US) match of up to a generous/ 3%, while existing full time employee’s got everything.
So Dad, who was working at Sear’s, got $65k a year, (mid 80’s, so $168k in 2023 money), was working alongside coworkers making $7.5K a year., ($19k in 2023 dollars).
Eunicecycle
@Mr. Bemused Senior: my favorite line from all his movies!
eclare
@NotMax:
Hahaha…
sab
Unconnected to any dog, or political party, or BJ conflict: My pitbull (mutt, probably an actual american staffordshire retriever because she looks exactly like the breed standard)
@Jay: I always thought that tiers thinking finished off American Unions. Trusted the old guard to protect the new members, and instead the old guard screwed the kids to pay for their own powerboats and better pensions.
In Ohio here, everyone I know my kids age hates unions. They betrayed their newer members so the old guard could have better pensions. Hopefully the UAW (autoworkers) has finally done its job and changed course. I will believe it when I see it.
Subsole
@geg6:
Yeah. Never mind the dating. As a straight white man I have ZERO urge to get back into gaming. Because I am older now, and getting called various racial and/or gender slurs in nine different languages by a bunch of early teen sweatlords just doesn’t have that same giggly, furtively transgressive charm it once held, I suppose.
sab
@sab: But there is no other way to proceed than them do their jobs. It’s just that they do have to do their jobs.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: They claim the First Amendment just means you’re free to be any kind of Christian, which involves ignoring all the times various Founding Fathers explicitly said “no, that is specifically not what we mean, we support equal rights for Muslims and atheists”.
wjca
It might be more useful to compare the numbers for 18-30 year olds. Rather than the whole population.
Martin
@C Stars: It can be. There’s a spectrum of ace types. Some are not interested in relationships at all. Some aren’t interested in sex until a relationship is really strongly formed, so they might think they are anti-sex asexual and then it flips a bit. Some are romantic, they want all the standard trappings of a relationship but aren’t interested in sex. Some are okay having sex to become closer to someone, but otherwise aren’t interested (they don’t have a sex drive, per se, but they aren’t opposed to sex). Some are sex-hostile – they find sex to be gross. Some are only interested in sex for procreation.
Subsole
@Martin:
I think a part of it is the way these online spaces amplify underlying trends by locking people into positive feedback loops that reinforce the behavior.
A lot of these online spaces are very much not just echo chambers. They are amplification chambers.
Subsole
@WaterGirl:
Asexual.
Martin
@WaterGirl: One snapshot (guardian article)
A more recent snapshot (BBC)
Subsole
@WaterGirl: He’s a misogynist creep who looks like someone glued googly eyes to a dildo.
Nelle
@Suzanne: My son would groan about being the youngest child of older parents (I was 39, his dad 46 when he was born; our parents were old when we were born – my grandfather was born in 1863). However, when a grandfather died when my son was 23, my son inherited a chunk of change , enough for a down payment. He was paying less per month for house payments than he would have for rent and building equity. There are some advantages to having old parents and grandparents. We’ll get out of your way earlier.
YY_Sima Qian
I agree w/ George Takai’s take, & Arab Americans voting for Trump or staying home next year would be exercising self harm. However, I think the more pertinent data for Dems is how many Japanese Americans still voted for FDR while under internment (could they even vote), and how many voted for Truman in ‘48.
Jay
@wjca:
so, for those age groups, male to female in China it’s
113.8 to 100
in the US its
105 to 100
Globally it’s
102 to 100
so no matter where you live as a male, some of you are not getting screwed.
Not a huge difference in the stat’s until you get to us olds.
No matter what your Reichwing Uncle told you at the Thanksgiving dinner table or some SBF “math dude” wrote in the FTFNYT Op Ed, there is not a huge wave of surplus CCP Males ready to wash over the world in an orgy of WWIII invasion and sexual violence.
Martin
@Suzanne: There wasn’t an audience for it a decade ago. And we can thank Mr Grab Them By the Pussy for shattering that taboo. So while I won’t argue that the behavior wasn’t there, I will argue that it wasn’t public, it wasn’t proud. It was something that would hurt your career to associate with, and that’s changed now – maybe it will hurt you but maybe it will help you.
As to the broader dynamic I think the thesis that the 2008 financial crisis that fucked over pretty much everyone who wasn’t rich, and let all the assholes responsible off the hook really helped to cement the idea with a lot of young men that playing the game as society wanted you to play it was going to result in you working really hard and getting fucked over by some other rich asshole in the next crisis. And the only way to avoid that was to BE the asshole fucking over other people – hence crypto, meme stocks, manosphere grifts, and Trump. Only suckers and losers get a 9-5. The way to get ahead is to hustle, and scam people – including women. Maybe especially women.
Millennials got 9/11 fallout and the financial crisis. Zoomers got the financial crisis and Covid. I’m Gen X. My career was established pre 9/11. Already owned a house. We had equity by 2008, so the financial crisis didn’t affect us. If anything we had an advantage because we had cash and could invest when the market went to shit. Roll forward a bit and I could retire early and own my house outright.
We have a lot of work to rebuild an economy that would allow my kids to do that, which they won’t really need to do because mom and dad can fill in that gap. But that sure as shit ain’t most people. I don’t fault them for being angry – they should be. I don’t fault them for giving up on the system. But there are better ways to channel that energy. And I’m proud that a LOT of young people are channeling it in a better direction, but holy shit are so many of them on the knife edge of just giving up on the whole thing.
Martin
@Freemark: Most really successful people are assholes. Usually their success came from being abnormally focused on the thing of their success – business, or science or art or whatever – usually at the expense of friends, family, normal social interactions, etc. Usually getting that balance right means giving up the thing that might make you famous. It’s a kind of perverted survivors bias.
Ohio Mom
@Freemark: I don’t know about Jonas Salk but Albert Sabin (as an adult) lived in the same neighborhood as Ohio Dad when OD was a boy, and Sabin was widely recognized as being a dick.
sab
@Ohio Mom: Sabin had a live vaccine. Salk had a killed vaccine. The live vaccine was stronger, but could and did infect other family members. Get your kid vaccinated and Grandpa dies of polio. So even in science, a dick.
YY_Sima Qian
@Jay: The official data may slightly overestimate the male to female ratio due to the unregistered female births in rural areas in the 90s & 00s. The competition for brides is made worse by the fact that some urban middle class young women do not feel motivated to marry & have children.
Sadly, the skewer ratio & unmet demand has created a market for human trafficking women from Vietnam & Laos to China, sold into marriages in rural China.
brantl
@NotMax: Make Anerica F∪ck Interparty Again.
Jay
@YY_Sima Qian
It’s no different here, other than law enforcement, and it goes both ways. Steve married a Japanese bride. John married a Vietnamese bride. Gary immigrated from China to Canada and took an Askwanashki bride.*
There is a big market here for “buying” brides. A lot of scams and sex trafficking as well.
*best of the deals. She is drop dead pretty and a wonderful person.
Early on, SWMBO and I agreed we would not have kids, and even earlier, when we were dating, I paid for her 2nd degree, because she had spent years as a no Green Card Trophy wife to a Software nerd in the US, and her previous degree was useless. I had money at the time. Was crazy about here from the first time I met her.
We don’t have “trad roles”.
Ironcity
@Doc Sardonic: Yes, it’s Kevin. As in Kevin Bacon, divide by 7 degrees of separation.
Chris
@Martin:
“There wasn’t any particular trick to becoming rich – as long as one devoted his whole life to it to the exclusion of everything else. Lando wasn’t capable of it; to him, money was a means to an end. It became meaningless when it was an end in itself.”
– The Lando Calrissian Adventures
(Actually some of the first Star Wars books ever written).
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Left forearm. Didn’t hit muscle, nerve, bone or blood vessel. About 1/2 inch deep.
Arclite
Literally the central theme of the most famous Star Trek movie, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”