There have been a general loss of ability to abstract and generalise, is my opinion. The generations born during and after the 1980s have real trouble with abstract thought, and generalisations, to say nothing about how deficient their ability to use figurative speech is - they tend to be very literal-minded, which ties into all this emotionality that's replaced thought, reason and logic.
In other words, the 40 and younger crowd have, as a group, a retarded cognitive and intellectual ability and are stuck on the same developmental level as pre-pubescent children. They grow older, but they don't grow up or become adults.
And so all their other input/output also becomes retarded, and emotional, and since the strongest emotion expressed is the truest one felt, the greater the psychotic break displayed the more truth to your statement your are awarded:
"Oh look how angry she is, she must really be speaking truth"
(If you pictured the insufferable Greta at the UN just now, well there you go: as an Avatar of what you speak of, she serves purpose.)
Another thing on the man/woman stuff is this:
->When someone describes stereotypical male behaviour, men usually nods in agreement and points out that it's not the behaviour as such that is a problem (the bragging/mocking-dynamics in an all-male group of friends f.e.) but when it goes to excess (mocking turning into bullying).
->When someone describes stereotypical female behaviour, women usually protest and object and rail against being subjected to sweeping generalisations.
That difference in basic mental function is crucial to this, I'd argue. It is kin to the "Women expressing wants/Men expressing needs"-difference that's so very visible in our differing attitudes to sex. Men feel and express sex(uality) as a [Need], while for women it is a [Want). A need is something you must have; a want is something you can take or leave as it pleases you.
About the "my personal experience trumps yours"-olympics: those originates with feminism in the 1960s. Feminists used to hold study circles, sometimes called "covens" just to be really edgy and to create a Dolchstoss-legend about Men always stepping on the lived knowledgexperience of women, in which they would in turn tell about when they had been subjected to whatever.
The one telling the best horror-story got the most adulation and support, and gained in status over the others. I don't need to detail how that behaviour has continued to spiral since then. When my wife was looking into that scene in the late 1980s/early 1990s, any woman in such a group without at least one rape or some incest "under her belt" so to speak simply wasn't awarded any pull or position of authority. No victimhood = no say. Objecting to that meant being shut out.
I could go on and discuss the class-aspect of this too, since it runs parallel to this all throughout the history of feminism - real women as I call them never needed nor wanted feminists. They wanted equal pay, franchise, ability to apply for the same jobs as men on the same terms, and not being fired for getting pregnant. Feminists were always spoiled upper-middle class twats and bints of the Daddy's Widdle Pwincess-variety, and thus behaves accordingly.
It'll sort itself out however.
The more they are told "No" and "Make me" when they make noise, the sooner they go away. That goes for the likes of Tate too, for that matter.
YES, Rikard, perfectly said. But then I have been called a “female misogynist” more than a few times over the years. I think women use the “it’s my time of the month” excuse as justification for their surly and rude behavior. No wonder men make jokes about it. It’s better than whacking them in the head with a crystal
ashtray, but not nearly as satisfying. (I aged myself with that remark) My sisters always played that card to explain away their nastiness and it really bothered me. Just take some aspirin, STFU and go to your room! They were insufferable.
Don’t even get me started on “feminists”. Ugly, angry, annoying beasts. I became a police officer in the early 80’s when there were almost no women in law enforcement. And the reasons were legitimate. Most women are too small, too weak and too emotional for the profession. I was the first woman in my department. Was I hated? No, but I put up with a lot of teasing, testing, ridicule and sexual harassment. Best way to end that shit with the guys was to dish it right back and prove myself more than capable. Before long it was no longer an issue. But I worked with women over the years who absolutely did not belong in uniform. And if they didn’t get promoted or get the assignment they wanted it was always because they were women. In reality, they were just lousy officers.
The attitude of “I am woman give me more because I have a twat” is so destructive. Families suffer. Marriages suffer. Businesses suffer.
In my (fairly limited) experience there are some women who are really quite strongly affected by the monthly delights, and others not so much. The 'bean-thrower', for example, was at all other times totally normal and great to be with. She was demon-possessed for about 10% of any given month though 😂
That’s just sad. I can’t imagine my “monthly” causing that much misery for me or those around me. I’m just a believer in not inflicting my issues onto others. And certainly not every month. Goodness. I hope she cleaned up the mess herself. If her period caused her that much mental torment…just wait until menopause!! Get a helmet and some Xanax.
I've got to be fair to the ex. She was quite distressed by her own irrational behaviour which she fully recognised as such. We eventually sought medical advice and a bit of HRT made a massive difference to the severity of the mood swings and the like.
I honestly don't know what it must feel like to have your emotions so out of kilter for a few days a month. It's probably a more extreme case but she really was otherwise an awesome person!
I’ve known many women like your ex who really struggled every month. Cramps and terrible mood swings. My sister was an absolute beast! Must have been tough.
"Best way to end that shit with the guys was to dish it right back and prove myself more than capable."
Oh yeah - for both men and women. Push back is expected. If you don't, you're a wuss, is the rule. Swedish female poice come in two favours: real, and desk-warmers. The real ones are the real deal; the desk-warmers have zero street experience yet they are the ones being promoted, including to National Chief of Police...
And it's beginning to show that the intelligence-test score required to go to the academy is 3, on a 1-9 scale (the one our military uses). 1-3 means mental retardation and an IQ below 85.
The test I took back in 1982 was so difficult they had to change it a few years after I was hired on. It was meant to get rid of people. Of 1000 people that took the written exam only 100 passed high enough to go in to the physical fitness assessment. Of those 100 only 24 finished. 1000 people applied for 3 openings. I was the only female who made it past the fitness test. The final decision was based on an interview with three Chiefs of Police from local jurisdictions. There was a good reason it was so difficult.
Know what the requirements are now? If you’re breathing and not a convicted felon you’re in!
Sounds like the requirements for Teacher's Aide and prison screw resp:
18+ years old, Swedish citizen, class B driver's license (normal car) for auto and stick, not convicted of certain crimes.
That's it. With those criteria they expect people to apply to be teachers' aides for the royal sum of the eq. of $1 400 to $1 800 per month, after taxes, for a 45 hour work week spent trying to herd and keep order among rowdy JDs and other teens.
👍 Your, and Rudolph's comment about "that time of the month" reminded me of a sign above a female fellow worker's desk that said, "I'm having my period and I have a gun. Any questions?" Think she was obliged to remove it, but Rudolph should probably be happy that all his wife had was a pot of beans and not a gun ... 😉🙂
But quite agree with you about feminists -- some useful insights and justified grievances from that quarter, but too many are narrow-minded, dogmatic, and scientific illiterates. Not to mention that, as UK lawyer and Substacker Helen Dale once put it, the "transcult is the bastard child of feminism":
I've noticed (perhaps) a rise in this 'literal-mindedness' - although it's hard to say whether a perceived tendency in online comments amounts to any real trend. The " it's your job to make each other happy" came from an article extolling the virtues of marriage that I read (I've seen similar 'meme' pearls of wisdom before), but the comments were interesting.
There were a fair number of comments delving into the meaning and taking it far too 'literally'. To me it's entirely *obvious* what this kind of 'meme' is getting at. I see similar tendencies all over the place online - where there's a lot of arguing about the detail of something that is trying to convey a more general point - it's as if there's a loss of ability, or willingness, to 'go beyond' and look at the 'spirit' of what's being said.
But online 'discourse' is a bit different to that which exists in 'real' life and so I don't want to draw any general conclusions - or at least not be confident in such conclusions.
I was kind of on board with a lot of the goals of earlier feminism (2nd wave?). There were some attitudes and practices that definitely disfavoured women that needed to be changed, in my view. I don't, for example, see why any particular job should be 'only for men' or 'only for women' (except perhaps some really specific ones) - although I have no problem with either sex having to meet the specific requirements to be *able to do* the job properly.
Trying to enforce some pre-determined 50/50 quota is just silly.
Modern feminism seems to be a bit all over the place and mostly constructs 'caricatures' of men and also 'caricatures' of the issues facing women. One response to this, along with the judicial mismatch in how men and women are treated in things like divorce, for example, has been the rise of MGTOW which is just the male flip-side of this caricature-generation exercise.
It's that 'balance' thing again. The endless pandering to how people 'feel', as if that's the only thing that matters, an attitude that has probably been driven by 'feminism', has gone too far. I'm not saying it's not important, but that it's only one factor that should be going into any kind of 'policy'.
I don't know how we claw our way back to some kind of sane middle-ground here - especially not if your thesis of the under-40's is correct.
Feminism is not women's rights movement; feminism is a specific ideology that during the 1960s and 1970s (generally speaking, details may matter with nation) overtook, co-opted and edged-out the women's rights movements that pre-dates feminism proper.
Women's rights were concerned with equal pay, equality before the law, and other fully material stuff (such as not getting fired for pregnancy, a quite reasonable demand).
Feminism being wholly ideological was and is only concerned with symbolic measures intended to make the ideological absract principles into mayerial reality, with well-known results. Want 50/50 male/female police officers? Drop the bar until enough women can become officers, and fire enough male officers to achieve 50/50.
What this does to objectively measruable effectivity is secondary or irrelevant.
Why feminism is like this is because it originates as an off-shoot of Lenin-era Soviet Marxist theory, and has inherited all the characteristics of the initial and failed attempts to create a communist economy (which Lenin himself realised was an abject failure on all fronts only two years after implementation).
The difference is that feminism and feminists are shileded against the consequences of their policies by the state(s) they operate within, since those are much more robust than 1920s Soviet Russia. Which "wave" of feminism one speaks about is an illusion: there's only one wave. What is described as waves is simply the generational breaks within the cult, when younger and more radical women replace the older generation as the Matriarch and decider of truths.
Being married to a woman with a background in Women's Studies has its benefits.
"But online 'discourse' is a bit different to that which exists in 'real' life and so I don't want to draw any general conclusions - or at least not be confident in such conclusions."
I'm not basing it on online discourse, though, but on empirical observations while lecturing and tutoring, and from my various classes over a 25-year period. It originated in real life, and predates online discourse as we know it by a decade or so. It appeares simultaneously with a marked inability among the people born from ca 1990 onwards in feeling and seeing themselves as part of a group (such as a class). Many times I've encountered otherwise normal students who after I gave the class a run-down of what was expected of them in ways of prep for next week's "sermons" (I use the old-old school style when lecturing), piped up and asked what the assignment was. These students had not being doing anything else, while I was talking. And their rebuttal when informed that I just told the class all that, was a uniform: "But you didn't tell ME it!".
And they were completely unable to understand that they were /part of the class/. Today, in online parlance, it is called MCS: Main Character Syndrome, half-jokingly. Me and my colleagues called them divas, but the split between the sexes was funnily enough about 50/50.
Speaking of the Red Rage. My wife once knocked me unconscious. To be fair, I had just dropped an ice-cold can of lager (unopened) down the back of her panties. As I ran off, she hurled it at my back, hitting me squarely in "the Aryan knob" (the little bump at the end of the skull where it meets the neck is nicknamed that, for some reason) knocking me flat on my face and out for a minute or so. ½kilo of liquid in a metal canister is quite dangerous, even if you don't drink it.
Oh, holy shit Rikard! If she had tossed it harder she could have killed you. When I’ve reached my boiling point, which is rare, I have always gone for a walk. My husband knows to just leave me alone and let me wander. When he’s about to blow he either builds something or fixes something. Living in the country and having a lot of land, animals and out-buildings there are plenty of ways to blow off some steam and not kill each other. And living out here we could get away with it. 🤣
Ha - it's easy to sound 'great' with a few well-chosen words - you should ask my ex-partners about my shortcomings 😂
I wasn't able to make my marriage, or my other very long-term relationship, properly work out in the 'forever' sense - much to my regret - but I think we managed to get at least a decade of really good times in, in both cases.
There have been a general loss of ability to abstract and generalise, is my opinion. The generations born during and after the 1980s have real trouble with abstract thought, and generalisations, to say nothing about how deficient their ability to use figurative speech is - they tend to be very literal-minded, which ties into all this emotionality that's replaced thought, reason and logic.
In other words, the 40 and younger crowd have, as a group, a retarded cognitive and intellectual ability and are stuck on the same developmental level as pre-pubescent children. They grow older, but they don't grow up or become adults.
And so all their other input/output also becomes retarded, and emotional, and since the strongest emotion expressed is the truest one felt, the greater the psychotic break displayed the more truth to your statement your are awarded:
"Oh look how angry she is, she must really be speaking truth"
(If you pictured the insufferable Greta at the UN just now, well there you go: as an Avatar of what you speak of, she serves purpose.)
Another thing on the man/woman stuff is this:
->When someone describes stereotypical male behaviour, men usually nods in agreement and points out that it's not the behaviour as such that is a problem (the bragging/mocking-dynamics in an all-male group of friends f.e.) but when it goes to excess (mocking turning into bullying).
->When someone describes stereotypical female behaviour, women usually protest and object and rail against being subjected to sweeping generalisations.
That difference in basic mental function is crucial to this, I'd argue. It is kin to the "Women expressing wants/Men expressing needs"-difference that's so very visible in our differing attitudes to sex. Men feel and express sex(uality) as a [Need], while for women it is a [Want). A need is something you must have; a want is something you can take or leave as it pleases you.
About the "my personal experience trumps yours"-olympics: those originates with feminism in the 1960s. Feminists used to hold study circles, sometimes called "covens" just to be really edgy and to create a Dolchstoss-legend about Men always stepping on the lived knowledgexperience of women, in which they would in turn tell about when they had been subjected to whatever.
The one telling the best horror-story got the most adulation and support, and gained in status over the others. I don't need to detail how that behaviour has continued to spiral since then. When my wife was looking into that scene in the late 1980s/early 1990s, any woman in such a group without at least one rape or some incest "under her belt" so to speak simply wasn't awarded any pull or position of authority. No victimhood = no say. Objecting to that meant being shut out.
I could go on and discuss the class-aspect of this too, since it runs parallel to this all throughout the history of feminism - real women as I call them never needed nor wanted feminists. They wanted equal pay, franchise, ability to apply for the same jobs as men on the same terms, and not being fired for getting pregnant. Feminists were always spoiled upper-middle class twats and bints of the Daddy's Widdle Pwincess-variety, and thus behaves accordingly.
It'll sort itself out however.
The more they are told "No" and "Make me" when they make noise, the sooner they go away. That goes for the likes of Tate too, for that matter.
YES, Rikard, perfectly said. But then I have been called a “female misogynist” more than a few times over the years. I think women use the “it’s my time of the month” excuse as justification for their surly and rude behavior. No wonder men make jokes about it. It’s better than whacking them in the head with a crystal
ashtray, but not nearly as satisfying. (I aged myself with that remark) My sisters always played that card to explain away their nastiness and it really bothered me. Just take some aspirin, STFU and go to your room! They were insufferable.
Don’t even get me started on “feminists”. Ugly, angry, annoying beasts. I became a police officer in the early 80’s when there were almost no women in law enforcement. And the reasons were legitimate. Most women are too small, too weak and too emotional for the profession. I was the first woman in my department. Was I hated? No, but I put up with a lot of teasing, testing, ridicule and sexual harassment. Best way to end that shit with the guys was to dish it right back and prove myself more than capable. Before long it was no longer an issue. But I worked with women over the years who absolutely did not belong in uniform. And if they didn’t get promoted or get the assignment they wanted it was always because they were women. In reality, they were just lousy officers.
The attitude of “I am woman give me more because I have a twat” is so destructive. Families suffer. Marriages suffer. Businesses suffer.
In my (fairly limited) experience there are some women who are really quite strongly affected by the monthly delights, and others not so much. The 'bean-thrower', for example, was at all other times totally normal and great to be with. She was demon-possessed for about 10% of any given month though 😂
That’s just sad. I can’t imagine my “monthly” causing that much misery for me or those around me. I’m just a believer in not inflicting my issues onto others. And certainly not every month. Goodness. I hope she cleaned up the mess herself. If her period caused her that much mental torment…just wait until menopause!! Get a helmet and some Xanax.
I've got to be fair to the ex. She was quite distressed by her own irrational behaviour which she fully recognised as such. We eventually sought medical advice and a bit of HRT made a massive difference to the severity of the mood swings and the like.
I honestly don't know what it must feel like to have your emotions so out of kilter for a few days a month. It's probably a more extreme case but she really was otherwise an awesome person!
I’ve known many women like your ex who really struggled every month. Cramps and terrible mood swings. My sister was an absolute beast! Must have been tough.
"Best way to end that shit with the guys was to dish it right back and prove myself more than capable."
Oh yeah - for both men and women. Push back is expected. If you don't, you're a wuss, is the rule. Swedish female poice come in two favours: real, and desk-warmers. The real ones are the real deal; the desk-warmers have zero street experience yet they are the ones being promoted, including to National Chief of Police...
And it's beginning to show that the intelligence-test score required to go to the academy is 3, on a 1-9 scale (the one our military uses). 1-3 means mental retardation and an IQ below 85.
The test I took back in 1982 was so difficult they had to change it a few years after I was hired on. It was meant to get rid of people. Of 1000 people that took the written exam only 100 passed high enough to go in to the physical fitness assessment. Of those 100 only 24 finished. 1000 people applied for 3 openings. I was the only female who made it past the fitness test. The final decision was based on an interview with three Chiefs of Police from local jurisdictions. There was a good reason it was so difficult.
Know what the requirements are now? If you’re breathing and not a convicted felon you’re in!
Sheesh!
Sounds like the requirements for Teacher's Aide and prison screw resp:
18+ years old, Swedish citizen, class B driver's license (normal car) for auto and stick, not convicted of certain crimes.
That's it. With those criteria they expect people to apply to be teachers' aides for the royal sum of the eq. of $1 400 to $1 800 per month, after taxes, for a 45 hour work week spent trying to herd and keep order among rowdy JDs and other teens.
👍 Your, and Rudolph's comment about "that time of the month" reminded me of a sign above a female fellow worker's desk that said, "I'm having my period and I have a gun. Any questions?" Think she was obliged to remove it, but Rudolph should probably be happy that all his wife had was a pot of beans and not a gun ... 😉🙂
But quite agree with you about feminists -- some useful insights and justified grievances from that quarter, but too many are narrow-minded, dogmatic, and scientific illiterates. Not to mention that, as UK lawyer and Substacker Helen Dale once put it, the "transcult is the bastard child of feminism":
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/a-common-humanity-or-bust?triedRedirect=true
I've noticed (perhaps) a rise in this 'literal-mindedness' - although it's hard to say whether a perceived tendency in online comments amounts to any real trend. The " it's your job to make each other happy" came from an article extolling the virtues of marriage that I read (I've seen similar 'meme' pearls of wisdom before), but the comments were interesting.
There were a fair number of comments delving into the meaning and taking it far too 'literally'. To me it's entirely *obvious* what this kind of 'meme' is getting at. I see similar tendencies all over the place online - where there's a lot of arguing about the detail of something that is trying to convey a more general point - it's as if there's a loss of ability, or willingness, to 'go beyond' and look at the 'spirit' of what's being said.
But online 'discourse' is a bit different to that which exists in 'real' life and so I don't want to draw any general conclusions - or at least not be confident in such conclusions.
I was kind of on board with a lot of the goals of earlier feminism (2nd wave?). There were some attitudes and practices that definitely disfavoured women that needed to be changed, in my view. I don't, for example, see why any particular job should be 'only for men' or 'only for women' (except perhaps some really specific ones) - although I have no problem with either sex having to meet the specific requirements to be *able to do* the job properly.
Trying to enforce some pre-determined 50/50 quota is just silly.
Modern feminism seems to be a bit all over the place and mostly constructs 'caricatures' of men and also 'caricatures' of the issues facing women. One response to this, along with the judicial mismatch in how men and women are treated in things like divorce, for example, has been the rise of MGTOW which is just the male flip-side of this caricature-generation exercise.
It's that 'balance' thing again. The endless pandering to how people 'feel', as if that's the only thing that matters, an attitude that has probably been driven by 'feminism', has gone too far. I'm not saying it's not important, but that it's only one factor that should be going into any kind of 'policy'.
I don't know how we claw our way back to some kind of sane middle-ground here - especially not if your thesis of the under-40's is correct.
Thanks for an extensive reply.
Feminism is not women's rights movement; feminism is a specific ideology that during the 1960s and 1970s (generally speaking, details may matter with nation) overtook, co-opted and edged-out the women's rights movements that pre-dates feminism proper.
Women's rights were concerned with equal pay, equality before the law, and other fully material stuff (such as not getting fired for pregnancy, a quite reasonable demand).
Feminism being wholly ideological was and is only concerned with symbolic measures intended to make the ideological absract principles into mayerial reality, with well-known results. Want 50/50 male/female police officers? Drop the bar until enough women can become officers, and fire enough male officers to achieve 50/50.
What this does to objectively measruable effectivity is secondary or irrelevant.
Why feminism is like this is because it originates as an off-shoot of Lenin-era Soviet Marxist theory, and has inherited all the characteristics of the initial and failed attempts to create a communist economy (which Lenin himself realised was an abject failure on all fronts only two years after implementation).
The difference is that feminism and feminists are shileded against the consequences of their policies by the state(s) they operate within, since those are much more robust than 1920s Soviet Russia. Which "wave" of feminism one speaks about is an illusion: there's only one wave. What is described as waves is simply the generational breaks within the cult, when younger and more radical women replace the older generation as the Matriarch and decider of truths.
Being married to a woman with a background in Women's Studies has its benefits.
"But online 'discourse' is a bit different to that which exists in 'real' life and so I don't want to draw any general conclusions - or at least not be confident in such conclusions."
I'm not basing it on online discourse, though, but on empirical observations while lecturing and tutoring, and from my various classes over a 25-year period. It originated in real life, and predates online discourse as we know it by a decade or so. It appeares simultaneously with a marked inability among the people born from ca 1990 onwards in feeling and seeing themselves as part of a group (such as a class). Many times I've encountered otherwise normal students who after I gave the class a run-down of what was expected of them in ways of prep for next week's "sermons" (I use the old-old school style when lecturing), piped up and asked what the assignment was. These students had not being doing anything else, while I was talking. And their rebuttal when informed that I just told the class all that, was a uniform: "But you didn't tell ME it!".
And they were completely unable to understand that they were /part of the class/. Today, in online parlance, it is called MCS: Main Character Syndrome, half-jokingly. Me and my colleagues called them divas, but the split between the sexes was funnily enough about 50/50.
Speaking of the Red Rage. My wife once knocked me unconscious. To be fair, I had just dropped an ice-cold can of lager (unopened) down the back of her panties. As I ran off, she hurled it at my back, hitting me squarely in "the Aryan knob" (the little bump at the end of the skull where it meets the neck is nicknamed that, for some reason) knocking me flat on my face and out for a minute or so. ½kilo of liquid in a metal canister is quite dangerous, even if you don't drink it.
Oh, holy shit Rikard! If she had tossed it harder she could have killed you. When I’ve reached my boiling point, which is rare, I have always gone for a walk. My husband knows to just leave me alone and let me wander. When he’s about to blow he either builds something or fixes something. Living in the country and having a lot of land, animals and out-buildings there are plenty of ways to blow off some steam and not kill each other. And living out here we could get away with it. 🤣
You sound like a great husband!
I like that red-blue graphic - because it reinforces my unscientific opinion.
Ha - it's easy to sound 'great' with a few well-chosen words - you should ask my ex-partners about my shortcomings 😂
I wasn't able to make my marriage, or my other very long-term relationship, properly work out in the 'forever' sense - much to my regret - but I think we managed to get at least a decade of really good times in, in both cases.
Haha! Yes, like marking your own homework!
Excellent post.
Thankyou
Thanks Antipodes - very much appreciated