Reminiscent of the shooting of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where there was a toxic-waste-producing facility right nearby (and you can supposedly see toxic waste on camera) and some of the cast and crew got ill or died from horrible cancers.[0]
If you read journalism about why women are frustrated with dating today, one of the number-one complaints is that the men they are meeting are “flaky”, women can’t trust that the man will be there for her. Your depiction that “women don’t really need men” completely misses the current trend that this thread is about.
> complaints is that the men they are meeting are “flaky”, women can’t trust that the man will be there for her.
No, that's not a complaint that the "modern" man isn't some sort of 1950s provider, it's a complaint that he does not text back. Everyone on the apps suffers from ghosting. It's exhausting because you have to be "On" in 100% of your interactions and texts but there's only like a 2% chance it will continue in any shape no matter what you do.
Even the "tradwife" trend is not actually harkening back to the 50s and a strong provider man, and instead lionizes a reality that never existed and is much more about wanting to check out of the rat race that harms us all. These women do not want to be a 1950s homemaker, they just want to focus on their hobbies and not worry about money.
I never said women don't need men, did I? Let me read what I said again.
No, I never said that. I said women need safety, and society is largely not safe for them.
Human beings are social creatures. Women need men. Women need women. Men need women. Men need men. We all need each other.
The system patterns of online dating cultivate undesirable traits in both men and women which result in side effects that no one would want. "Flakiness" is one such side effect.
Online dating dynamics create high abundance, low commitment environments that systematically produce “flakiness,” so the issue isn’t about women needing men or not, but that both sexes operate in a degraded safety/trust landscape shaped by platform incentives rather than by real world social cues. Restore actual interpersonal safety and the entire pattern shifts positive, with less defensive behavior, less attrition, less pain, and more ethical orgasms.
All people, regardless of gender, should cultivate a safety in both society and in themselves. This safety is liberating. Instead of controlling people, you free them. Instead of binding, you uplift. Instead of harming, you heal. This is the basis of safety.
Perhaps one of the problems with modern dating is that women expect a man to provide safety, but many men don’t want to be viewed as a source of safety? Me, I am only interested in relationship for companionship, someone with whom I can share interesting experiences, because joy is not complete unless it is shared. But when it comes to safety and security, a partner is on her own. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t do this or that for a partner, but it would be supererogatory. My male friends have a similar complaint, this isn’t just a HN thing.
Again, this is probably an outcome of modernity. I likely wouldn’t think this way as a man, if I didn’t grow up in a modern age hearing that women are strong, they can take care of themselves and no longer depend on men.
Safety doesn't mean you're a provider. It means you are safe to be authentic with. Safe to share truth with.
That safety takes many forms.
You cannot have depth without that safety. It is physical, it is also emotional and intellectual.
For instance, without safety a partner would never join you on many interesting experiences. If you want those experiences, they need to be able to trust you.
Now extend that idea of safety to a broad society context, and that is approaching what I was speaking to.
The safety I have heard demanded directly from women to me as a partner – or from female friends about the man they seek – is the safety of being a provider, giving them a feeling of security that they can’t manage to achieve on their own. It’s not just about a man being safe to be with. Again, you are speaking about something I haven’t heard from actual women, and I think I’ll trust the latter (and reportage matching it) over a HN stranger for forming my assumption of what women want from relationships.
And again, maybe part of why women might be having problems with dating is that many men today don’t want to be seen as a big emotional support for a partner either. That’s draining and time-consuming. This might bother you, but my whole point is that the social pressures are no longer there to compel men (or women) to act a certain way, and that is impacting dating.
> from women to me as a partner – or from female friends about the man they seek
How many people are you talking about here? Like if you had to rephrase this point using numbers would you say “I’ve heard half a dozen women say this”?
That aside, can you elaborate on safety as a demand? I’ve never had a partner or friend demand safety from me, ever. The only times in my life that I have seen someone demand safety from another is when the latter is acting violent or reckless to the point that their behavior poses a threat.
I fear our friend we're replying to here may have never had a deep relationship with the opposite sex.
This is unfortunately the reality of countless men, often going their entire lives like this, with bitterness and resentment growing outwardly instead of reflection inwardly.
Hijacking this response now for some advice / thoughts.
So for the lurking straight men: women are simply human beings trapped in a form you desire. The game here is simple. Don't try and control women as objects. Instead, try and control your desire.
I can promise with certainty, if you control your desire, everything you've ever dreamed and more will appear. This is not an easy game to play. But it is the only way to win.
Don't pursue women as romantic interests. Ever. Leave them alone. Instead, connect with them only as friends, and only as they initiate. This is the first step to escape the brainwashing we've all been subjected to.
This means you will be going through a withdrawal. It is difficult. Take a hike. Pour yourself into work. Take on new hobbies. Grow yourself.
Friends will appear. It doesn't matter what sex they are, they are friends, treat them with the same respect and kindness as you would anyone. This is your first test. This could appear in months, it could appear in years, it all depends on you.
We need to start seeing the light in each other, beyond the skin. Every single person, regardless of how you view them, has a universe in them. Help them become their universe. Don't trap them in yours.
I would wish we existed in a world where these things are lived by, and need not be said. But I know that someday, it will be this way. We will all see each other's humanity. We will inspire each other, enabling the maximum in creative output for everyone, regardless of our lineage and forms. We won't desire vengeance towards nor suffering for anyone any longer because the vastness of the ever expanding cosmos is so much larger than the finite histories of our pain.
It is from that place I try to share some thoughts. I wouldn't think I'd have to say "women are people too" from that place, but it has broad applicability and seems to be necessary in today's world.
The parent post is getting flack, but it’s hard to see why it is controversial. I have heard “women want a man who will provide and protect” from every single woman I have ever dated or been married to, from every female friend with whom I could have such deep conversations, and from the literature I read in my anthropology-adjacent academic field. At some point one feels one has enough data to reasonably assume it’s a heterosexual human universal (in the typological sense, i.e. not denying the existence of many exceptions).
I can believe that many women are having a hard time under modernity, because so many men no longer feel bound by the former expectations of old-school protector and provider behavior. Some men, like me, now view relationships as two autonomous individuals coming together to share sublime things like hobbies, art or travel, but don’t want to be viewed as a source of security. Other men might be just extracting casual sex from women and then will quickly move on. There’s much less social pressure on men to act a certain way, which in turn impacts on what women experience.
You’re probably consuming too much red pill nonsense if it’s hard for you to see why claiming that women who experience multiple sexual partners are mentally damaged is controversial.
The veneer of modern pop psych doesn’t change that this is just slut shaming, no different fundamentally from the claim that women who have multiple partners have loose vaginas. There’s no science behind these sorts of claims. It’s just a mask for insecurity.
Your understanding of the "anthropology-adjacent academic field" is wrong. There are so many ways humans have organized their societies and so many ways men and women have interacted, that to pretend there is some primeval hunter-gatherer society that generated all human evolutionary behaviours is silly. And a typical patriarchal construct that benefits men.
Making claims about "evolution" of "women" without even demonstrating a passing familiarity with the (controversial!) field of evolutionary psychology is a choice.
Because the post is making an unfounded claim about human female evolution along with another unfounded claim about modernity being different from the rest of history, which involves a ton of cultures and societies.
I think the claim that modernity is different is easily defendable. No society during the rest of history had such effective birth control, nor welfare states that removed pressure to produce offspring or even interact so much with family or other members of society. Again, as a man I feel like I am able to live a life very different than I would have been pressured into before, and this surely has ramifications for modern dating and relationships.
This is from the evolutionary psychiatry book The Moral Animal:
>"What the theory of natural selection says, rather, is that people's minds were designed to maximize fitness in the environment in which those minds evolved. This environment is known as the EEA—the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Or, more memorably: the 'ancestral environment.'...
>"What was the ancestral environment like? The closest thing to a twentieth-century example is a hunter-gatherer society, such as the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the Inuit (Eskimos) of the Arctic region, or the Ache of Paraguay.
>"Inconveniently, hunter-gatherer societies are quite different from one another, rendering simple generalization about the crucible of human evolution difficult. This diversity is a reminder that the idea of a single EEA is actually a fiction, a composite drawing; our ancestral social environment no doubt changed much in the course of human evolution. Still, there are recurring themes among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, and they suggest that some features probably stayed fairly constant during much of the evolution of the human mind. For example: people grew up near close kin in small villages where everyone knew everyone else and strangers didn't show up very often. People got married—monogamously or polygamously—and a female typically was married by the time she was old enough to be fertile."
--
The idea that modern life is different is obvious.
I get the impression that there's some other conversation going on here that has nothing to do with evolution and you are not saying "lets all live in Igloos...".
Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though. Around 2010 I said in passing, in a forum discussion about how a FOSS project was getting along, “…you’d think someone could send in a patch…”, and I immediately got flamed by several people because no one used patches any more.
> Funny how fast Git became entrenched as the way of doing things, though.
It just really highlights how much better BitKeeper and then Git's design was compared to what came before. You then pile on being free/OSS, and being "proven" by an extremely large, well known, and successful project on top, and you have yourself explosive growth.
There are developers around these days who never had the displeasure of using the pre-Git source control offerings; it was rough.
You can use `git format-patch` to export a range of commits from your local git tree as a set of patches. You can then use `git send-email` to send that patch set out to the appropriate mailing list and maintainers (or just do it in one step, send-email accepts a similar commit range instead of patch files). It talks directly to an SMTP server you have configured in your `.gitconfig` and sends out e-mail.
Of course, `git send-email` has a plethora of options, e.g. you'd typically add a cover letter for a patch set.
Also, in the Linux kernel tree, there are some additional helper scripts that you might want to run first, like `checkpatch.pl` for some basic sanity checks and `get_maintainer.pl` that tells you the relevant maintainers for the code your patch set touches, so you can add them to `--cc`.
The patches are reviewed/discussed on the mailing list that you sent them to.
On the receiving side, as a maintainer, you'd use `git am` (apply mail) that can import the commits from a set of mbox files into your local git tree.
For most people, git is that you work with pull requests, and already early on some bristled at the term “patches” which implied an obsolete way of working.
> there's a recent theory putting the location of the proto-Germanic speakers in Finland.
There is no credible theory to that effect. Either you have stumbled on something that is not taken seriously, or you are misunderstanding the consensus. Namely, Proto-Germanic speakers did visit the eastern Baltic coast for trading and raiding, and so there are Germanic loanwords into Finnic languages of Proto-Germanic date, but the agreed location where Proto-Germanic formed is in Scandinavia, not Finland.
Yes, I’m afraid that you are still misunderstanding the research. Your linked article speaks about gene flow associated with the movement of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers to Scandinavia, but later Proto-Germanic formed in southern Scandinavia according to the longstanding consensus. This is clearly spelled out in the abstract: “Following the disintegration of Proto-Germanic, we find by 1650 BP a southward push from Southern Scandinavia.”
There’s no new theory here at all, just some nice archaeogenetic evidence to support a quite traditional view. FWIW, I work in a closely related field and am constantly reading Germanic–Finnic and Baltic–Finnic contact literature, and I can assure you this is old-hat stuff.
Do you think I'm misunderstanding something other than that I'm not drawing the same distinction between proto-Germanic and "paleo-Germanic" that that paper appeals to?
You've quoted something that says after proto-Germanic had diversified, daughter lineages left southern Scandinavia to establish themselves elsewhere in the world.
But I pointed out a completely different idea in the paper, that before proto-Germanic diversified, about 2000 years before the time you mention, its speakers arrived in Scandinavia from "the northeast coast of the Baltic".
Your post above wrote “the location of the proto-Germanic speakers”. Terminology matters; Proto-Germanic is something strictly defined as to what it was, with a longstanding consensus about where and when it was. If you wanted to talk about pre-Proto-Germanic speakers (or “Paleo-Germanic” speakers as this paper does, though I suspect some would quibble with that term used for a very early date), then you could have done so.
Moreover, you posted about a “new theory”, but the paper here only gives new evidence for an old theory.
The South China Morning Post itself recently wrote on speculation that Beijing could try to challenge Tokyo’s control of Okinawa, given its history and proximity to Taiwan.[0]
About a decade ago, some Chinese propagandists were encouraging calling Okinawa the Ryukyu kingdom and trying to ferment an independence campaign. It didn’t get too far.
Ryukyu was an independent kingdom with its own ruling court, language, culture etc until 1872, when it was annexed by Japan. Quite a few Okinawans would rather like to return to the previous state of affairs, although probably not if it involves exchanging the Japanese yoke for the Chinese one. (Ryukyu was a Qing tributary, but the Qing had bigger problems on their hands than worrying about a bunch of small islands.)
Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
There seems to be a popular view nowadays that most old people grow to be senile (just look at any online discussion of old politicians for example). This is not the case!
Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.
By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.
Or possibly, actors who still have their faculties tend to keep acting, even into advanced age. Not sure if that's true, but even the perception of that being true could lead to these kinds of assumptions.
This has long been pretty obvious to anyone using Nitter on desktop. There, you can ctrl-click on usernames to open a new tab, and it is readily obvious from the account’s post history that the people behind so many “authentic American” accounts are not authentic Americans. They make little telltale mistakes in their English, they post single-mindedly about a particular topic like few real people (no matter how much they like political battle) would, the profile pic was obviously created by GAN3-style AI, etc.
It’s fast and trivial to verify on any non-enshittified interface. One of the problems with modern social media is that people are looking at it (usually on their phones) through the platform’s intentionally crippled UI that doesn’t allow quickly opening new views.
If you see English written without articles (‘the’ and ‘a’) by someone who is ‘an American’, it was probably written by a Russian. It’s very easy to spot non-native English writing if you’re a native speaker.
It’s such an old concept that it’s written about in the Bible (Old Testament), referred to as a ‘shibboleth’, which in that case was a spoken word that revealed the native language of someone due to their inability to pronounce the word like a native speaker.
Reminiscent of a finding reported at a neurology conference in the 1960s that served as the epigraph to J.H. Prynne’s collection of poems Wound Response:
“Of particular interest in the present context are the observations made on patients whose middle ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the electrode… One patient reported gustatory sensations.”
During the 2016 election, it was big in the news that a whole ring of fake-news social media accounts and news websites was run out of North Macedonia.[0] And not out of nefarious meddling in American internal affairs, but because the men involved knew American culture well enough to know that riling up readers in a wealthy but politically polarized country could bring in profit. How fast that story was forgotten.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Filming