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Sunak needs a better strategy – politicalbetting.com

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  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Sandpit said:

    glw said:

    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    A lot of knock on effects of the attacks on Israel to come in the next few weeks and months.

    Firstly, looks like Ukraine is shafted. GOP reps already looking to make any spending commitments prioritise Israel at the expense of Ukraine. Russia is making sure its propagandists are amplifying this - it’s the let’s cancel x and use the money to fund y tactic for the US right.

    Second, probably another refugee crisis for Europe to brace for, especially if Egypt is unwelcoming to Gaza Palestinians. And it’ll be politically toxic in Europe given the terrorist origins of what’s about to happen.

    Finally, the usual oil price response, just in time for Boreal winter. Depends how wide any conflict spreads.

    US support for Ukraine has been waning and has become a completely partisan issue, already suffering, and now there is a massive distraction event and situation much closer to many of their hearts.

    Putin will have been dreaming for a scenario like this. The worst people always find a way to prosper.
    It's dead easy for the administration to link Ukraine and this attack in Israel as both being aided by Iran. Then you say funding Israel and Ukraine is part of fighting a common enemy. It also happens to be broadly true.
    Wouldn’t want to be working in that Iranian factory that makes the Shahed drones at the moment. Several countries will be eyeing that place up as a target.
    They can eye it up all they like but its 200km inland from the Gulf at Isfahan so there's only one country that has the capability to flatten it. I don't think JRB wants a war with Iran in an election year.
    You saying Israel doesn't have the capability? I think Israeli capabilities are going to see many exceeded stretch goals in coming weeks.
    Yes, I am somewhat mystified by this remark

    Israel has a defence budget five times larger than Iran's, specifically it has a superior air force, with more and better aircraft (and of course in any strike it will be greatly aided, either openly or covertly, by the USA - and possibly other countries that loathe Iran like Saudi or the UAE)

    https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-comparison-detail.php?Submit=COMPARE&country1=iran&country2=israel&form=form

    I am fairly sure Israel could, in these circumstances, hit Iran where it hurts. The only doubt might be Iran having nukes and the ability to use them, but this is highly unlikely, at the moment
    Your forgetting that Iranian missile/drone technology is pretty advanced . They've ballistic missiles so any Israeli strike could invite retaliation. Do the IDF really want a hot war with Iran?
    That's a valid but different point

    @Dura_Ace was claiming that only America could hit the Iranian drone factory, coz it's 200km inland (or whatever)

    I reckon this is nonsense; The Israeli air force is highly capable, and superior to Iran's, and will have covert assistance from the USA (and others)

    They could definitely take it. But then, yes, they risk retaliation from Tehran. But that has been the case for years, and as 600 Israelis have just died in a single day, Bibi might not care
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094

    Sunak doesn't need a better strategy.

    The country needs a better Prime Minister.

    The Tories need a better leader.

    True, but...

    If we accept that Sunak is a dud, that's four Conservative Prime Ministers in a row who have rapidly failed. (Five if you count single party majority Dave as different to Coalition Dave.) And arguably, in ways that ought to have been obvious with even moderate foresight.

    At some point, you have to pause with fishing dead bodies out of the river and go upstream. What is it about today's Conservative Party that means that they keep selecting leaders who aren't up to the job? Is it their selection process, or is it that the Conservatives are trying to do something that can't really be done?
    But then, it's the same with Labour. They had a run of three leaders (four if you count Harman) who proved disasters, and Blair was at best a mixed blessing.

    We get the politicians we deserve.

    Boy, we must have done some bad shit.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094

    Sunak doesn't need a better strategy.

    The country needs a better Prime Minister.

    The Tories need a better leader.

    True, but...

    If we accept that Sunak is a dud, that's four Conservative Prime Ministers in a row who have rapidly failed. (Five if you count single party majority Dave as different to Coalition Dave.) And arguably, in ways that ought to have been obvious with even moderate foresight.

    At some point, you have to pause with fishing dead bodies out of the river and go upstream. What is it about today's Conservative Party that means that they keep selecting leaders who aren't up to the job? Is it their selection process, or is it that the Conservatives are trying to do something that can't really be done?
    That's up to the electorate when they go to vote at the next election.

    In the mean time are we just supposed to keep a dead body in situ?
    Surely a corpse would be an improvement on Sunak?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,673
    You want a proper F word laden rant? Look no further than Ronan O’Gara:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K-dwDQW6ee0

    Up there in the echelons with this

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0QMV622vY8w
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,203

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Sandpit said:

    glw said:

    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    A lot of knock on effects of the attacks on Israel to come in the next few weeks and months.

    Firstly, looks like Ukraine is shafted. GOP reps already looking to make any spending commitments prioritise Israel at the expense of Ukraine. Russia is making sure its propagandists are amplifying this - it’s the let’s cancel x and use the money to fund y tactic for the US right.

    Second, probably another refugee crisis for Europe to brace for, especially if Egypt is unwelcoming to Gaza Palestinians. And it’ll be politically toxic in Europe given the terrorist origins of what’s about to happen.

    Finally, the usual oil price response, just in time for Boreal winter. Depends how wide any conflict spreads.

    US support for Ukraine has been waning and has become a completely partisan issue, already suffering, and now there is a massive distraction event and situation much closer to many of their hearts.

    Putin will have been dreaming for a scenario like this. The worst people always find a way to prosper.
    It's dead easy for the administration to link Ukraine and this attack in Israel as both being aided by Iran. Then you say funding Israel and Ukraine is part of fighting a common enemy. It also happens to be broadly true.
    Wouldn’t want to be working in that Iranian factory that makes the Shahed drones at the moment. Several countries will be eyeing that place up as a target.
    They can eye it up all they like but its 200km inland from the Gulf at Isfahan so there's only one country that has the capability to flatten it. I don't think JRB wants a war with Iran in an election year.
    You saying Israel doesn't have the capability? I think Israeli capabilities are going to see many exceeded stretch goals in coming weeks.
    Yes, I am somewhat mystified by this remark

    Israel has a defence budget five times larger than Iran's, specifically it has a superior air force, with more and better aircraft (and of course in any strike it will be greatly aided, either openly or covertly, by the USA - and possibly other countries that loathe Iran like Saudi or the UAE)

    https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-comparison-detail.php?Submit=COMPARE&country1=iran&country2=israel&form=form

    I am fairly sure Israel could, in these circumstances, hit Iran where it hurts. The only doubt might be Iran having nukes and the ability to use them, but this is highly unlikely, at the moment
    Your forgetting that Iranian missile/drone technology is pretty advanced . They've ballistic missiles so any Israeli strike could invite retaliation. Do the IDF really want a hot war with Iran?
    If there were a hot war with Iran, would the US be able to repeat the arms-length strategy they've taken over Ukraine, or would they need to get directly involved?
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,677

    Dura_Ace said:

    Sandpit said:

    glw said:

    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    A lot of knock on effects of the attacks on Israel to come in the next few weeks and months.

    Firstly, looks like Ukraine is shafted. GOP reps already looking to make any spending commitments prioritise Israel at the expense of Ukraine. Russia is making sure its propagandists are amplifying this - it’s the let’s cancel x and use the money to fund y tactic for the US right.

    Second, probably another refugee crisis for Europe to brace for, especially if Egypt is unwelcoming to Gaza Palestinians. And it’ll be politically toxic in Europe given the terrorist origins of what’s about to happen.

    Finally, the usual oil price response, just in time for Boreal winter. Depends how wide any conflict spreads.

    US support for Ukraine has been waning and has become a completely partisan issue, already suffering, and now there is a massive distraction event and situation much closer to many of their hearts.

    Putin will have been dreaming for a scenario like this. The worst people always find a way to prosper.
    It's dead easy for the administration to link Ukraine and this attack in Israel as both being aided by Iran. Then you say funding Israel and Ukraine is part of fighting a common enemy. It also happens to be broadly true.
    Wouldn’t want to be working in that Iranian factory that makes the Shahed drones at the moment. Several countries will be eyeing that place up as a target.
    They can eye it up all they like but its 200km inland from the Gulf at Isfahan so there's only one country that has the capability to flatten it. I don't think JRB wants a war with Iran in an election year.
    You saying Israel doesn't have the capability? I think Israeli capabilities are going to see many exceeded stretch goals in coming weeks.
    They'd have to tank the strike package 1,500km across Jordan and Iraq/Saudi and back. When/if they get there the HESA facility covers 500 acres and they have suppress the inevitable massive AD.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,673
    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    It’s a long way to fly, over Jordanian and Saudi airspace. And those drones don’t seem to be directly menacing Israel, so why would they?
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,115
    TimS said:

    You want a proper F word laden rant? Look no further than Ronan O’Gara:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K-dwDQW6ee0

    Up there in the echelons with this

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0QMV622vY8w

    O’Gara is full of passion. The players look like they don’t give a fuck.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,397
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Sandpit said:

    glw said:

    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    A lot of knock on effects of the attacks on Israel to come in the next few weeks and months.

    Firstly, looks like Ukraine is shafted. GOP reps already looking to make any spending commitments prioritise Israel at the expense of Ukraine. Russia is making sure its propagandists are amplifying this - it’s the let’s cancel x and use the money to fund y tactic for the US right.

    Second, probably another refugee crisis for Europe to brace for, especially if Egypt is unwelcoming to Gaza Palestinians. And it’ll be politically toxic in Europe given the terrorist origins of what’s about to happen.

    Finally, the usual oil price response, just in time for Boreal winter. Depends how wide any conflict spreads.

    US support for Ukraine has been waning and has become a completely partisan issue, already suffering, and now there is a massive distraction event and situation much closer to many of their hearts.

    Putin will have been dreaming for a scenario like this. The worst people always find a way to prosper.
    It's dead easy for the administration to link Ukraine and this attack in Israel as both being aided by Iran. Then you say funding Israel and Ukraine is part of fighting a common enemy. It also happens to be broadly true.
    Wouldn’t want to be working in that Iranian factory that makes the Shahed drones at the moment. Several countries will be eyeing that place up as a target.
    They can eye it up all they like but its 200km inland from the Gulf at Isfahan so there's only one country that has the capability to flatten it. I don't think JRB wants a war with Iran in an election year.
    You saying Israel doesn't have the capability? I think Israeli capabilities are going to see many exceeded stretch goals in coming weeks.
    Yes, I am somewhat mystified by this remark

    Israel has a defence budget five times larger than Iran's, specifically it has a superior air force, with more and better aircraft (and of course in any strike it will be greatly aided, either openly or covertly, by the USA - and possibly other countries that loathe Iran like Saudi or the UAE)

    https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-comparison-detail.php?Submit=COMPARE&country1=iran&country2=israel&form=form

    I am fairly sure Israel could, in these circumstances, hit Iran where it hurts. The only doubt might be Iran having nukes and the ability to use them, but this is highly unlikely, at the moment
    Your forgetting that Iranian missile/drone technology is pretty advanced . They've ballistic missiles so any Israeli strike could invite retaliation. Do the IDF really want a hot war with Iran?
    That's a valid but different point

    @Dura_Ace was claiming that only America could hit the Iranian drone factory, coz it's 200km inland (or whatever)

    I reckon this is nonsense; The Israeli air force is highly capable, and superior to Iran's, and will have covert assistance from the USA (and others)

    They could definitely take it. But then, yes, they risk retaliation from Tehran. But that has been the case for years, and as 600 Israelis have just died in a single day, Bibi might not care
    Back in 1981 they took out Saddams nuclear reactor at not dissimilar distance.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera#:~:text=On 7 June 1981, a,Osirak reactor deep inside Iraq.

  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    edited October 2023
    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    It’s a long way to fly, over Jordanian and Saudi airspace. And those drones don’t seem to be directly menacing Israel, so why would they?
    Because, as I say, it would be a good outcome for many reasons, desired by several countries. Put it this way, if the Israeli air force volunteers for the job, I don't think the Pentagon will say OMG No!
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,851
    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
  • TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    It’s a long way to fly, over Jordanian and Saudi airspace. And those drones don’t seem to be directly menacing Israel, so why would they?
    Because Iran is supplying arms to Hamas and its not a lot of airspace between Gaza and Israel.

    Do Israel have warships that can fire missiles? If so they could fire from the Arabian Sea without crossing anyone other than Iran's airspace.
  • ydoethur said:

    Sunak doesn't need a better strategy.

    The country needs a better Prime Minister.

    The Tories need a better leader.

    True, but...

    If we accept that Sunak is a dud, that's four Conservative Prime Ministers in a row who have rapidly failed. (Five if you count single party majority Dave as different to Coalition Dave.) And arguably, in ways that ought to have been obvious with even moderate foresight.

    At some point, you have to pause with fishing dead bodies out of the river and go upstream. What is it about today's Conservative Party that means that they keep selecting leaders who aren't up to the job? Is it their selection process, or is it that the Conservatives are trying to do something that can't really be done?
    But then, it's the same with Labour. They had a run of three leaders (four if you count Harman) who proved disasters, and Blair was at best a mixed blessing.

    We get the politicians we deserve.

    Boy, we must have done some bad shit.
    Mostly, we collectively opted out of the political process, except for voting in elections.

    In doing so, we left it to the Activists. They've always been there, they've always been strange, but in the past they have been diluted by inactive, social members. And beyond a certain point, the loss of more normal party members becomes a doom loop.

    (Joining the threads together, the Young Conservatives was said to be the middle-class Tinder of its day. Hard to see that being the case now.)
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 21,680

    viewcode said:

    This is a video with a voiceover generated by elevenlabs.io . It is based on the voice of the actor Michael Ironside. it sounds exactly like him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0kbNDaenjk

    This is a video with fake voiceover of Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and John Howard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-6Niw_ZTJo

    This is a video with fake voiceover of Field Marshal Montgomery surrendering to the Germans following the invasion of Britain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JywyBE-cyHg

    None of these voices are real. As I have pointed out over the past weeks, we are already in a world where recorded verbal evidence is not sufficient.

    Montgomery seems to have flashes of an American accent. Did he actually sound like that - some artefact of his Irish heritage perhaps - or was the AI just a bit crap?
    I think you're right. It sounded *like* him, but not exactly like him - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8TlQVHRhyA
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,285

    Leon said:

    Aaaaaaaand.... now the inevitable beheading videos, live, on air

    I shall not link

    I wonder if @FrancisUrquhart is right and some ISIS members have drifted back to Hamas, or whether Hamas see ISIS as an inspiration

    This whole appalling episode feels like a catastrophe for the Palestinian cause, even in the midst of a military "victory"

    Its as smart a strategic move as Operation Barbarossa, or the attack on Pearl Harbor.
    Or the Yom Kippur War, whose 50th anniversary it just about is.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,601
    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    Fallacy there. Dating apps weren't so peevalent in 2003, at a time when people were still aware of AIDS. And liking a male on a dating app doesn't ensure that the female will get a look in. As the difference in the figures shows else it'd be more like elephant seal or honeybee drone ratios of male to female.
  • Leon said:

    ydoethur said:

    Omnium said:

    Sandpit said:

    Nigelb said:

    ydoethur said:

    I'm sitting outside, in shorts and a shirt, eating lunch, a third of the way through October, for the second year in a row. Madness.

    You're right.
    Lunch at 4.15 ??
    Lunch should be taken at 1pm, and tea at 3:40pm.
    That only applies if there are ladies present. In their absence a good lunch can last well into the next day.
    Indeed.

    *burps*

    My Lord, the port is with you.
    I once co-hosted a party which somehow lasted three days. People woke up on the first morning-after-the-spectacular-night-before, variously scattered around our building in Red Lion Square, and in the gardens of the Square itself. We found people sleeping in the stairwell, in cupboards, etc. Then they immediately started partying again, and so it went on, marvellously

    Ah, sweet dreams of youth...

    I once went to a party on the Friday (at someone’s house, who I’ve never seen before or since), necked a load of pills, smoked a load of dope and drank a load of booze and had a cracking night. Woke up on the sofa the next morning after three hours kip, cup of tea and a bacon sarnie, started on the booze nice and early and dropped some more pills at 10 in the morning. I remember precisely nothing until 24 hours later when I woke up on the living room floor, naked, under a rug with an equally naked buxom half-Italian girl. Biggest aureolas I’ve ever seen. Never seen her before or since either. I would love to know what the hell happened in that missing 24 hours.

    That’ll be about 20 years ago now. The thought of doing all that now fills me with absolute horror. Glad I did it then though 🤣
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,285
    Dura_Ace said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Sandpit said:

    glw said:

    kle4 said:

    TimS said:

    A lot of knock on effects of the attacks on Israel to come in the next few weeks and months.

    Firstly, looks like Ukraine is shafted. GOP reps already looking to make any spending commitments prioritise Israel at the expense of Ukraine. Russia is making sure its propagandists are amplifying this - it’s the let’s cancel x and use the money to fund y tactic for the US right.

    Second, probably another refugee crisis for Europe to brace for, especially if Egypt is unwelcoming to Gaza Palestinians. And it’ll be politically toxic in Europe given the terrorist origins of what’s about to happen.

    Finally, the usual oil price response, just in time for Boreal winter. Depends how wide any conflict spreads.

    US support for Ukraine has been waning and has become a completely partisan issue, already suffering, and now there is a massive distraction event and situation much closer to many of their hearts.

    Putin will have been dreaming for a scenario like this. The worst people always find a way to prosper.
    It's dead easy for the administration to link Ukraine and this attack in Israel as both being aided by Iran. Then you say funding Israel and Ukraine is part of fighting a common enemy. It also happens to be broadly true.
    Wouldn’t want to be working in that Iranian factory that makes the Shahed drones at the moment. Several countries will be eyeing that place up as a target.
    They can eye it up all they like but its 200km inland from the Gulf at Isfahan so there's only one country that has the capability to flatten it. I don't think JRB wants a war with Iran in an election year.
    You saying Israel doesn't have the capability? I think Israeli capabilities are going to see many exceeded stretch goals in coming weeks.
    They'd have to tank the strike package 1,500km across Jordan and Iraq/Saudi and back. When/if they get there the HESA facility covers 500 acres and they have suppress the inevitable massive AD.
    They could probably strike it ?

    But the question would be whether they could do sufficient damage to justify the cost, and likely consequences.
  • kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    Not a huge kernel, though.

    Comparing 2000-2 and 2016-8,

    The absolute increase in sexual inactivity was most pronounced among men aged 18 to 24 years (18.9% vs 30.9%; aOR, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.04-1.39). In this age group, the proportions of those reporting weekly or more sexual activity (51.8% vs 37.4%; aOR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79-0.99) and those reporting 1 sexual partner (44.2% vs 30.0%; aOR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.80-0.98) decreased.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2767066
  • Leon said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    It’s a long way to fly, over Jordanian and Saudi airspace. And those drones don’t seem to be directly menacing Israel, so why would they?
    Because, as I say, it would be a good outcome for many reasons, desired by several countries. Put it this way, if the Israeli air force volunteers for the job, I don't think the Pentagon will say OMG No!
    There's a bit of a Strangers on a Train opportunity here.

    America and Ukraine either can't or won't strike Iran. Israel can, but might not want to.

    America should with plausible deniability encourage Israel to strike the Shahed manufacturing, and then America should offer extra support to Israel for entirely unconnected reasons.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 10,673
    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
  • Leon said:

    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle

    Of course, Russia isn't Israel's ally and that is MAGA Trumpism.

    Traditional GOP are pro-Israel, anti-Russia.
    MAGA GOP are inverted.
  • Leon said:

    Aaaaaaaand.... now the inevitable beheading videos, live, on air

    I shall not link

    I wonder if @FrancisUrquhart is right and some ISIS members have drifted back to Hamas, or whether Hamas see ISIS as an inspiration

    This whole appalling episode feels like a catastrophe for the Palestinian cause, even in the midst of a military "victory"

    Its as smart a strategic move as Operation Barbarossa, or the attack on Pearl Harbor.
    Not if it is ISIS. Kill a lot of Israelis and have Israel kill even more Palestinians, which will radicalise your followers, and also wipe out Hamas leaving ISIS running the show.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Leon said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    It’s a long way to fly, over Jordanian and Saudi airspace. And those drones don’t seem to be directly menacing Israel, so why would they?
    Because, as I say, it would be a good outcome for many reasons, desired by several countries. Put it this way, if the Israeli air force volunteers for the job, I don't think the Pentagon will say OMG No!
    There's a bit of a Strangers on a Train opportunity here.

    America and Ukraine either can't or won't strike Iran. Israel can, but might not want to.

    America should with plausible deniability encourage Israel to strike the Shahed manufacturing, and then America should offer extra support to Israel for entirely unconnected reasons.
    The mysterious sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines is, for some unconnected reason, coming in to mind
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,285
    Leon said:

    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance

    And if the raid were (as is quite possible) a failure ?
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,851

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    Not a huge kernel, though.

    Comparing 2000-2 and 2016-8,

    The absolute increase in sexual inactivity was most pronounced among men aged 18 to 24 years (18.9% vs 30.9%; aOR, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.04-1.39). In this age group, the proportions of those reporting weekly or more sexual activity (51.8% vs 37.4%; aOR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79-0.99) and those reporting 1 sexual partner (44.2% vs 30.0%; aOR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.80-0.98) decreased.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2767066
    Crap source because I can't be arsed to dig out the full dataset, but it's Pew Research Center data, linked to in the article.

    https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/6-out-of-10-young-men-are-single-disturbing-reasons-why/

    63% of men 18-29 are single in 2022, compared to 51% in 2019.

    How the figures compare for women:

    32% were single in 2019, vs 34% in 2022, so virtually static. And also, the huge gap between male and female there, in both years sampled.

    As the FT says, "disconcertingly, there is a kernel of truth in the incel worldview".

    I don't like it, and I often want to slap the hell out of some of my younger friends who are incel wallowers. But the data on this doesn't lie, more and more young men are becoming sexless, while women are having the same amount of sex, but with fewer partners. This is hard data, not conjecture. The numbers are there, in absolute, unambiguous black and white.
  • kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    What Daryl Huff called a "semi-attached figure". In the same way that Twitter isn't the real world, neither is Tinder. (Other apps are available.)
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,115

    Leon said:

    ydoethur said:

    Omnium said:

    Sandpit said:

    Nigelb said:

    ydoethur said:

    I'm sitting outside, in shorts and a shirt, eating lunch, a third of the way through October, for the second year in a row. Madness.

    You're right.
    Lunch at 4.15 ??
    Lunch should be taken at 1pm, and tea at 3:40pm.
    That only applies if there are ladies present. In their absence a good lunch can last well into the next day.
    Indeed.

    *burps*

    My Lord, the port is with you.
    I once co-hosted a party which somehow lasted three days. People woke up on the first morning-after-the-spectacular-night-before, variously scattered around our building in Red Lion Square, and in the gardens of the Square itself. We found people sleeping in the stairwell, in cupboards, etc. Then they immediately started partying again, and so it went on, marvellously

    Ah, sweet dreams of youth...

    I once went to a party on the Friday (at someone’s house, who I’ve never seen before or since), necked a load of pills, smoked a load of dope and drank a load of booze and had a cracking night. Woke up on the sofa the next morning after three hours kip, cup of tea and a bacon sarnie, started on the booze nice and early and dropped some more pills at 10 in the morning. I remember precisely nothing until 24 hours later when I woke up on the living room floor, naked, under a rug with an equally naked buxom half-Italian girl. Biggest aureolas I’ve ever seen. Never seen her before or since either. I would love to know what the hell happened in that missing 24 hours.

    That’ll be about 20 years ago now. The thought of doing all that now fills me with absolute horror. Glad I did it then though 🤣
    Let me tell you something. I’ve seen it all before. I’ve inhaled hashish, I had an Afro haircut. I went to all-weekend binges to Prestatyn to see wings
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    edited October 2023
    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance

    And if the raid were (as is quite possible) a failure ?
    Didn't the Brits hit Berlin early in WW2 for exactly this reason? It was a grave risk, but the emotional power of the raid, thereby slaking the desire for revenge, and unnerving the Nazis, was deemed by us a prize worthy of the gamble
  • Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    All true except for the part where Israel wants to weaken Putin. Israel has been more studiedly neutral than Jeremy Corbyn.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Leon said:

    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle

    Of course, Russia isn't Israel's ally and that is MAGA Trumpism.

    Traditional GOP are pro-Israel, anti-Russia.
    MAGA GOP are inverted.
    It's a complex ecosystem, richly composted by TwitterX

    At the same time, my diggings have discovered that online Indians are now radically pro-Israel, because Hindu nationalists now officially hate Muslims - or so it seems
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,851
    edited October 2023

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557

    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    All true except for the part where Israel wants to weaken Putin. Israel has been more studiedly neutral than Jeremy Corbyn.
    A very fair point

    However I am still certain that Israel will do *something* against Iran

    Perhaps targeted assassination of Iranian leaders, which are more easily deniable
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,407
    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance

    And if the raid were (as is quite possible) a failure ?
    Didn't the Brits hit Berlin early in WW2 for exactly this reason? It was a grave risk, but the emotional power of the raid, thereby slaking the desire for revenge, and unnerving the Nazis, was deemed by us a prize worthy of the gamble
    And the Doolittle raid for the same reasons.

    Re your point about anti Israel MAGA factions I remember the Louis Theroux doc where he spent time with these wing nuts and the amount of anti-semitism was surprising and shocking.
  • Good evening

    Another depressing day of atrocities in the Middle East with untold consequences

    Sunak and Starmer stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel while Palestinian supporters parade in London and Manchester

    An Egyptian guard opens fire on a tourist bus of Israelis killing some and their Egyptian guide

    An innocent German woman is kidnapped with unspeakable consequences for her

    British citizens are trapped in the conflict as well as other nationalities

    The conflict threatens to spread to other countries and all the time Ukraine is at war with Russia

    The bond market crisis threatens the world's economies and we have Biden or Trump as the choice for the US next year .

    We can argue over Sunak and Starmer, but can anyone name any politician anywhere they would put their trust in to handle the fallout from these concurrent crisis
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 21,743
    edited October 2023
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    I don't believe so, at all.

    The figures I've seen not coming from nutters almost all tend to show little change in figures.

    When it comes to "in a relationship" (which is not the same as having sex), then women have consistently been in relationships at a higher rate than men at younger age-groups, not just now but in the past too.

    Because its not unusual for men to have a relationship with a younger woman, but the reverse is less common. And that's not a modern development.
  • ChrisChris Posts: 11,706

    Sunak doesn't need a better strategy.

    The country needs a better Prime Minister.

    The Tories need a better leader.

    True, but...

    If we accept that Sunak is a dud, that's four Conservative Prime Ministers in a row who have rapidly failed. (Five if you count single party majority Dave as different to Coalition Dave.) ...
    If you count Cameron, you may as well say eight Conservative Party Leaders in a row.

  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,653
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    All true except for the part where Israel wants to weaken Putin. Israel has been more studiedly neutral than Jeremy Corbyn.
    A very fair point

    However I am still certain that Israel will do *something* against Iran

    Perhaps targeted assassination of Iranian leaders, which are more easily deniable
    Plausible deniability may be the thing in the West. In contrast to implausible deniabilty which is Putin's modus operandi.

  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026

    Good evening

    Another depressing day of atrocities in the Middle East with untold consequences

    Sunak and Starmer stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel while Palestinian supporters parade in London and Manchester

    An Egyptian guard opens fire on a tourist bus of Israelis killing some and their Egyptian guide

    An innocent German woman is kidnapped with unspeakable consequences for her

    British citizens are trapped in the conflict as well as other nationalities

    The conflict threatens to spread to other countries and all the time Ukraine is at war with Russia

    The bond market crisis threatens the world's economies and we have Biden or Trump as the choice for the US next year .

    We can argue over Sunak and Starmer, but can anyone name any politician anywhere they would put their trust in to handle the fallout from these concurrent crisis

    Not confirmed, Biden may still stand down and Trump could be in jail this time next year if convicted in any one of his criminal casesand a new GOP candidate selected
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,910
    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    I hope the Wokeists who cheered on the decline of free speech and free thought as an obstacle to the proper embrace of Wokery are now enjoying the spectacle of many young people (particularly young men) enthusiastically grabbing onto this ideology instead.

    It's the Paul Schofield speech for the mind: you must teach young people critical thinking, not to stop thinking.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    boulay said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance

    And if the raid were (as is quite possible) a failure ?
    Didn't the Brits hit Berlin early in WW2 for exactly this reason? It was a grave risk, but the emotional power of the raid, thereby slaking the desire for revenge, and unnerving the Nazis, was deemed by us a prize worthy of the gamble
    And the Doolittle raid for the same reasons.

    Re your point about anti Israel MAGA factions I remember the Louis Theroux doc where he spent time with these wing nuts and the amount of anti-semitism was surprising and shocking.
    Dig deep enough into the views of the conspiratorially minded and you will ALWAYS find anti-Semitism in the end. It's like digging into the grey sands around Baku. At some point you are bound to strike oil

    I know someone whose flat earth beliefs ultimately and complexly relate to his anti-Semitism. ie "They" - the Jews - "WANT you to believe the earth is round". I have never found out why the Jews want people to believe this
  • HYUFD said:

    Good evening

    Another depressing day of atrocities in the Middle East with untold consequences

    Sunak and Starmer stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel while Palestinian supporters parade in London and Manchester

    An Egyptian guard opens fire on a tourist bus of Israelis killing some and their Egyptian guide

    An innocent German woman is kidnapped with unspeakable consequences for her

    British citizens are trapped in the conflict as well as other nationalities

    The conflict threatens to spread to other countries and all the time Ukraine is at war with Russia

    The bond market crisis threatens the world's economies and we have Biden or Trump as the choice for the US next year .

    We can argue over Sunak and Starmer, but can anyone name any politician anywhere they would put their trust in to handle the fallout from these concurrent crisis

    Not confirmed, Biden may still stand down and Trump could be in jail this time next year if convicted in any one of his criminal casesand a new GOP candidate selected
    Indeed but my point is where are the worlds leaders capable of inspiration
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026
    edited October 2023
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,212

    Leon said:

    Actually, the more I think about it, the more a direct attack on Iran seems like a strong possibility

    Take out some of Iran's weapons industry and you gravely weaken Hamas, you weaken the arms flow to Putin, you help Ukraine, and you fuck over Iran

    That's a rare multiple win with one strike

    All true except for the part where Israel wants to weaken Putin. Israel has been more studiedly neutral than Jeremy Corbyn.
    Putin is now building Shaheed drones in Russia, so unlikely to weaken him much.

    Unless the Ukrainians keep hitting his armament factories with their own drones.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 59,910
    Leon said:

    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance

    Iran has been a problem for decades. It tries to develop nukes (which I bet it'd be tempted to use on Israel), foments conflict and terrorism and generates huge numbers of refugees that keep fleeing for the West.

    And yet, their people sort of still keep supporting / voting for it.

    Madness. But clearly trolling/defying and a theocracy the West is very popular amongst the base.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 56,705
    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance

    And if the raid were (as is quite possible) a failure ?
    Didn't the Brits hit Berlin early in WW2 for exactly this reason? It was a grave risk, but the emotional power of the raid, thereby slaking the desire for revenge, and unnerving the Nazis, was deemed by us a prize worthy of the gamble
    And the Doolittle raid for the same reasons.

    Re your point about anti Israel MAGA factions I remember the Louis Theroux doc where he spent time with these wing nuts and the amount of anti-semitism was surprising and shocking.
    Dig deep enough into the views of the conspiratorially minded and you will ALWAYS find anti-Semitism in the end. It's like digging into the grey sands around Baku. At some point you are bound to strike oil

    I know someone whose flat earth beliefs ultimately and complexly relate to his anti-Semitism. ie "They" - the Jews - "WANT you to believe the earth is round". I have never found out why the Jews want people to believe this
    Oh, they have seminars at the World Economic Forum about how best to persuade Normies* that the world is round. And, the speakers always have names like Meyer, Joshua or Isaac - wink, wink.

    * That what they call the dumb schmucks who aren't in on the whole WEF thing
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094
    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with
    You ever heard of divorce and polyamory, Hyufd?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026
    edited October 2023

    ydoethur said:

    Sunak doesn't need a better strategy.

    The country needs a better Prime Minister.

    The Tories need a better leader.

    True, but...

    If we accept that Sunak is a dud, that's four Conservative Prime Ministers in a row who have rapidly failed. (Five if you count single party majority Dave as different to Coalition Dave.) And arguably, in ways that ought to have been obvious with even moderate foresight.

    At some point, you have to pause with fishing dead bodies out of the river and go upstream. What is it about today's Conservative Party that means that they keep selecting leaders who aren't up to the job? Is it their selection process, or is it that the Conservatives are trying to do something that can't really be done?
    But then, it's the same with Labour. They had a run of three leaders (four if you count Harman) who proved disasters, and Blair was at best a mixed blessing.

    We get the politicians we deserve.

    Boy, we must have done some bad shit.
    Mostly, we collectively opted out of the political process, except for voting in elections.

    In doing so, we left it to the Activists. They've always been there, they've always been strange, but in the past they have been diluted by inactive, social members. And beyond a certain point, the loss of more normal party members becomes a doom loop.

    (Joining the threads together, the Young Conservatives was said to be the middle-class Tinder of its day. Hard to see that being the case now.)
    Similar to the church, declining church attendance and religious belief means hardline evangelicals make up a greater percentage of Christians in the UK. As much fewer people join political parties too, hardcore nationalist rightwingers and Thatcherites in the Conservatives and hardcore Corbynite socialists in Labour made up more of the parties memberships and normally elect one of their own unless they have been out of power and lost long enough to pick a Cameron or Starmer
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,851

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    I don't believe so, at all.

    The figures I've seen not coming from nutters almost all tend to show little change in figures.

    When it comes to "in a relationship" (which is not the same as having sex), then women have consistently been in relationships at a higher rate than men at younger age-groups, not just now but in the past too.

    Because its not unusual for men to have a relationship with a younger woman, but the reverse is less common. And that's not a modern development.
    The age thing is indeed a possible explanation for the discrepancy. As a 40 year old, I have recently dated a 24 year old and an 28 year old. Everyone shrugs. So what? Reverse that, and imagine I was a 40 year old woman...

    Yes, older men have always done well with younger women, tbh, I've done better in my 30s than I did in my 20s. What that doesn't change, is that there is a growing pool of angry, sexless young men aged 18-25ish who are easily radicalised and want to beat something up. Heck, the best of them get grifted by giving Andrew Tate 2000 bucks for a "course" to pick up girls. The worst of them go on disgusting, mad killing sprees.

    The problem is, the situation isn't static. It's quite clear from the stats that the number of sexless young men is increasing, statistically, significantly, year on year. And I put it to you that is a problem, because the world does not need a lot of angry young men with a lot to prove.
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle

    Of course, Russia isn't Israel's ally and that is MAGA Trumpism.

    Traditional GOP are pro-Israel, anti-Russia.
    MAGA GOP are inverted.
    It's a complex ecosystem, richly composted by TwitterX

    At the same time, my diggings have discovered that online Indians are now radically pro-Israel, because Hindu nationalists now officially hate Muslims - or so it seems
    https://indianexpress.com/article/india/pm-modi-reaction-hamas-israel-palestine-assault-8972604/lite/
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026
    edited October 2023
    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with
    You ever heard of divorce and polyamory, Hyufd?
    Yes but divorce just puts someone else on the marriage market eg a divorced ugly poor woman is highly unlikely to be a marriage partner of a handsome rich man, leaving her as an option for a single ugly poor incel to marry.

    You also still can't marry more than 1 person, despite polyamory
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026

    HYUFD said:

    Good evening

    Another depressing day of atrocities in the Middle East with untold consequences

    Sunak and Starmer stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel while Palestinian supporters parade in London and Manchester

    An Egyptian guard opens fire on a tourist bus of Israelis killing some and their Egyptian guide

    An innocent German woman is kidnapped with unspeakable consequences for her

    British citizens are trapped in the conflict as well as other nationalities

    The conflict threatens to spread to other countries and all the time Ukraine is at war with Russia

    The bond market crisis threatens the world's economies and we have Biden or Trump as the choice for the US next year .

    We can argue over Sunak and Starmer, but can anyone name any politician anywhere they would put their trust in to handle the fallout from these concurrent crisis

    Not confirmed, Biden may still stand down and Trump could be in jail this time next year if convicted in any one of his criminal casesand a new GOP candidate selected
    Indeed but my point is where are the worlds leaders capable of inspiration
    Hitler could be inspirational sometimes for his supporters, inspirational leaders are not all Mandela, Obama or JFK
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    edited October 2023
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Leon said:

    Also: Israelis will want REVENGE on Iran

    Emotion is boiling over in Israel. You can sense it on social media. 600 dead in a day = 4200 dead in a day in the UK or 21,000 dead in the USA (cf 2900 died in 9/11 and America was traumatised for years)

    So the people won't be content with grinding Gaza into dust, they will want action against Iran. Never underestimate the power of raw emotion, especially a thirst for vengeance

    And if the raid were (as is quite possible) a failure ?
    Didn't the Brits hit Berlin early in WW2 for exactly this reason? It was a grave risk, but the emotional power of the raid, thereby slaking the desire for revenge, and unnerving the Nazis, was deemed by us a prize worthy of the gamble
    And the Doolittle raid for the same reasons.

    Re your point about anti Israel MAGA factions I remember the Louis Theroux doc where he spent time with these wing nuts and the amount of anti-semitism was surprising and shocking.
    Dig deep enough into the views of the conspiratorially minded and you will ALWAYS find anti-Semitism in the end. It's like digging into the grey sands around Baku. At some point you are bound to strike oil

    I know someone whose flat earth beliefs ultimately and complexly relate to his anti-Semitism. ie "They" - the Jews - "WANT you to believe the earth is round". I have never found out why the Jews want people to believe this
    Oh, they have seminars at the World Economic Forum about how best to persuade Normies* that the world is round. And, the speakers always have names like Meyer, Joshua or Isaac - wink, wink.

    * That what they call the dumb schmucks who aren't in on the whole WEF thing
    I just tested my theory by doing an oil-check on David Icke. Until now I had no idea if he is anti-Semitic or not (his madness is so intense it is tedious, I never pay attention to him). Anyway I put in the disptick and yep, there is it, he's an anti-Semite, amongst much else

    https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/icke-antisemitic-conspiracies-viewed-over-30-million-times-new-research-shows-1.499368

    Anti-Semitism is so common I sometimes wonder if it is evolutionary, or genetic, some basic glitch in the human psyche

    eg There is a streak of anti-Semitism in Japanese society, despite the fact Jews have never really lived in Japan

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Japan
  • HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Good evening

    Another depressing day of atrocities in the Middle East with untold consequences

    Sunak and Starmer stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel while Palestinian supporters parade in London and Manchester

    An Egyptian guard opens fire on a tourist bus of Israelis killing some and their Egyptian guide

    An innocent German woman is kidnapped with unspeakable consequences for her

    British citizens are trapped in the conflict as well as other nationalities

    The conflict threatens to spread to other countries and all the time Ukraine is at war with Russia

    The bond market crisis threatens the world's economies and we have Biden or Trump as the choice for the US next year .

    We can argue over Sunak and Starmer, but can anyone name any politician anywhere they would put their trust in to handle the fallout from these concurrent crisis

    Not confirmed, Biden may still stand down and Trump could be in jail this time next year if convicted in any one of his criminal casesand a new GOP candidate selected
    Indeed but my point is where are the worlds leaders capable of inspiration
    Hitler could be inspirational sometimes for his supporters, inspirational leaders are not all Mandela, Obama or JFK
    That was not my question
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle

    Of course, Russia isn't Israel's ally and that is MAGA Trumpism.

    Traditional GOP are pro-Israel, anti-Russia.
    MAGA GOP are inverted.
    It's a complex ecosystem, richly composted by TwitterX

    At the same time, my diggings have discovered that online Indians are now radically pro-Israel, because Hindu nationalists now officially hate Muslims - or so it seems
    https://indianexpress.com/article/india/pm-modi-reaction-hamas-israel-palestine-assault-8972604/lite/
    Pakistanis are presumably mainly pro Hamas in contrast
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 41,919
    My new Lab membership card has a union jack on it. Grrr.
  • HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with
    You ever heard of divorce and polyamory, Hyufd?
    Yes but divorce just puts someone else on the marriage market eg a divorced ugly poor woman is highly unlikely to be a marriage partner of a handsome rich man, leaving her as an option for a single ugly poor incel to marry.

    You also still can't marry more than 1 person, despite polyamory
    It happened a lot in the Bible.
  • kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    I don't believe so, at all.

    The figures I've seen not coming from nutters almost all tend to show little change in figures.

    When it comes to "in a relationship" (which is not the same as having sex), then women have consistently been in relationships at a higher rate than men at younger age-groups, not just now but in the past too.

    Because its not unusual for men to have a relationship with a younger woman, but the reverse is less common. And that's not a modern development.
    The age thing is indeed a possible explanation for the discrepancy. As a 40 year old, I have recently dated a 24 year old and an 28 year old. Everyone shrugs. So what? Reverse that, and imagine I was a 40 year old woman...

    Yes, older men have always done well with younger women, tbh, I've done better in my 30s than I did in my 20s. What that doesn't change, is that there is a growing pool of angry, sexless young men aged 18-25ish who are easily radicalised and want to beat something up. Heck, the best of them get grifted by giving Andrew Tate 2000 bucks for a "course" to pick up girls. The worst of them go on disgusting, mad killing sprees.

    The problem is, the situation isn't static. It's quite clear from the stats that the number of sexless young men is increasing, statistically, significantly, year on year. And I put it to you that is a problem, because the world does not need a lot of angry young men with a lot to prove.
    I don't see any evidence whatsoever for a growing pool of angry, sexless young men.

    And if there are and they want to beat something, that's what their right hand is for.

    There's no excuse for any of this Tate nonsense.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,658
    edited October 2023

    Sunak doesn't need a better strategy.

    The country needs a better Prime Minister.

    The Tories need a better leader.

    Yes. Just very difficult to see who.
    More fun to speculate on which would be worse and how.

  • kinabalu said:

    My new Lab membership card has a union jack on it. Grrr.

    Were you unaware you were a member of a British Lab Party?

    Did you think you were a member of the Australian Lab Party?
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,851
    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    Yes, and here's a link to another study by Morgan Stanley, that predicts "45% of women will be single and childless by 2030" https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/45-percent-women-are-expected-to-be-single-and-childless-by-2030

    In terms of marriage, unfortunately again we're talking about America, but the stats can't be that far off for the UK - 25% of people don't marry by 40. https://time.com/6291040/unmarried-40-single-economy-pew/

    I'm not trying to justify any of this, or make incel points on a political forum. What I'm saying is, grifters like Andrew Tate exist and thrive in the modern world for a reason, because they promise something that is increasingly out of reach. Young guys will do almost anything for the faintest chance of a girl, I know this, having been a young guy myself. So they fall into the thrall of the "take roids, make money, buy a bugatti" BS.

    I'm trying to explain why a grifter like Tate can achieve world stardom, not trying to justify it.
  • HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle

    Of course, Russia isn't Israel's ally and that is MAGA Trumpism.

    Traditional GOP are pro-Israel, anti-Russia.
    MAGA GOP are inverted.
    It's a complex ecosystem, richly composted by TwitterX

    At the same time, my diggings have discovered that online Indians are now radically pro-Israel, because Hindu nationalists now officially hate Muslims - or so it seems
    https://indianexpress.com/article/india/pm-modi-reaction-hamas-israel-palestine-assault-8972604/lite/
    Pakistanis are presumably mainly pro Hamas in contrast
    Pakistan bans passports with Israel stamps in them.
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle

    Of course, Russia isn't Israel's ally and that is MAGA Trumpism.

    Traditional GOP are pro-Israel, anti-Russia.
    MAGA GOP are inverted.
    It's a complex ecosystem, richly composted by TwitterX

    At the same time, my diggings have discovered that online Indians are now radically pro-Israel, because Hindu nationalists now officially hate Muslims - or so it seems
    Whatever the reason, an Indian hackers group claims to have knocked out Hamas's website.
    https://twitter.com/CyberForceX/status/1710943141145055470

    Mind you, last week they were attacking Canada.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with
    You ever heard of divorce and polyamory, Hyufd?
    Yes but divorce just puts someone else on the marriage market eg a divorced ugly poor woman is highly unlikely to be a marriage partner of a handsome rich man, leaving her as an option for a single ugly poor incel to marry.

    You also still can't marry more than 1 person, despite polyamory
    It happened a lot in the Bible.
    Certainly not in the New Testament, as Jesus said 'For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will live with his wife. The two will become one.’ 6 So they are no longer two but one. Let no man divide what God has put together.”
  • RazedabodeRazedabode Posts: 3,027
    Ugh. Just seen those beheading videos Leon mentioned. A 10 year old boy.

    Seriously.. how anyone can look at that and feel supportive of Palestine or Hamas I do not know.
  • DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    The top 5% of women do not necessarily marry the top 5% of men. My wife, for example, married me.
    95% of married men should say they've married within the top 5% of women.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026
    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    The top 5% of women do not necessarily marry the top 5% of men. My wife, for example, married me.
    You are reasonably high earning, even if no Brad Pitt. So I imagine not too far from the top 5% career wise
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    kinabalu said:

    My new Lab membership card has a union jack on it. Grrr.

    And that is why Sir Kir Royale Starmer will almost certainly be getting MY vote! it is good to be on the same patriotic pro-Brexit, anti-mass-immigration, non-tax-raising, pro-capitalist side
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,653
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Good evening

    Another depressing day of atrocities in the Middle East with untold consequences

    Sunak and Starmer stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel while Palestinian supporters parade in London and Manchester

    An Egyptian guard opens fire on a tourist bus of Israelis killing some and their Egyptian guide

    An innocent German woman is kidnapped with unspeakable consequences for her

    British citizens are trapped in the conflict as well as other nationalities

    The conflict threatens to spread to other countries and all the time Ukraine is at war with Russia

    The bond market crisis threatens the world's economies and we have Biden or Trump as the choice for the US next year .

    We can argue over Sunak and Starmer, but can anyone name any politician anywhere they would put their trust in to handle the fallout from these concurrent crisis

    Not confirmed, Biden may still stand down and Trump could be in jail this time next year if convicted in any one of his criminal casesand a new GOP candidate selected
    Indeed but my point is where are the worlds leaders capable of inspiration
    Hitler could be inspirational sometimes for his supporters, inspirational leaders are not all Mandela, Obama or JFK
    Alastair Cooke in his letters from America described being at an event where Hitler was speaking (using the "one minute to midnight" trope) and several ladies swooning

  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,658
    Leon said:

    Interesting. I have discovered a sub-species of MAGA Trumpites that are ANTI Israel, or at least anti America spending any money to help Israel. Here is one. 400,000 followers

    https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle

    That's very unsurprising. Many of his biggest fans are very anti America hence all the pro Putin ones, far beyond being hesitant about Ukraine spending but full on Kremlin talking points.

    What's mure concerning is the rest of the GOP know that but don't care.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094
    Whoops, Mr Russell.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,029
    edited October 2023

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    The top 5% of women do not necessarily marry the top 5% of men. My wife, for example, married me.
    95% of married men should say they've married within the top 5% of women.


    (I, of course, actually did.)
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026
    edited October 2023
    kyf_100 said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    Yes, and here's a link to another study by Morgan Stanley, that predicts "45% of women will be single and childless by 2030" https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/45-percent-women-are-expected-to-be-single-and-childless-by-2030

    In terms of marriage, unfortunately again we're talking about America, but the stats can't be that far off for the UK - 25% of people don't marry by 40. https://time.com/6291040/unmarried-40-single-economy-pew/

    I'm not trying to justify any of this, or make incel points on a political forum. What I'm saying is, grifters like Andrew Tate exist and thrive in the modern world for a reason, because they promise something that is increasingly out of reach. Young guys will do almost anything for the faintest chance of a girl, I know this, having been a young guy myself. So they fall into the thrall of the "take roids, make money, buy a bugatti" BS.

    I'm trying to explain why a grifter like Tate can achieve world stardom, not trying to justify it.
    That is 45% of women single between 25 and 44. By 44 I expect it will be much less than 45% of women still single
  • Leon said:

    kinabalu said:

    My new Lab membership card has a union jack on it. Grrr.

    And that is why Sir Kir Royale Starmer will almost certainly be getting MY vote! it is good to be on the same patriotic pro-Brexit, anti-mass-immigration, non-tax-raising, pro-capitalist side
    KEEP CALMER AND...
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,658
    kinabalu said:

    My new Lab membership card has a union jack on it. Grrr.

    And you wanted a St George's Cross?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026
    edited October 2023

    Ugh. Just seen those beheading videos Leon mentioned. A 10 year old boy.

    Seriously.. how anyone can look at that and feel supportive of Palestine or Hamas I do not know.

    Hamas it seems are drifting towards ISIS, no wonder Netanyahu is responding so forcefully.

    Be wary of what you watch though, it is now illegal in the UK to even view material potentially propogating or helpful to terrorists
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with
    You ever heard of divorce and polyamory, Hyufd?
    Yes but divorce just puts someone else on the marriage market eg a divorced ugly poor woman is highly unlikely to be a marriage partner of a handsome rich man, leaving her as an option for a single ugly poor incel to marry.

    You also still can't marry more than 1 person, despite polyamory
    It happened a lot in the Bible.
    As the Wife of Bath said:

    Lo, heere the wise kyng, daun Salomon; Lo, (consider) here the wise king, dan Salomon;
    36 I trowe he hadde wyves mo than oon. I believe he had wives more than one.
    37 As wolde God it leveful were unto me As would God it were lawful unto me
    38 To be refresshed half so ofte as he! To be refreshed half so often as he!
    39 Which yifte of God hadde he for alle his wyvys! What a gift of God he had because of all his wives!
  • Ugh. Just seen those beheading videos Leon mentioned. A 10 year old boy.

    Seriously.. how anyone can look at that and feel supportive of Palestine or Hamas I do not know.

    Erm, iirc in the past watching beheading videos has been reason enough for a visit from the boys in blue looking for supporters of terrorism.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,670
    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    The top 5% of women do not necessarily marry the top 5% of men. My wife, for example, married me.
    You are reasonably high earning, even if no Brad Pitt. So I imagine not too far from the top 5% career wise
    No Brad Pitt? For shame sir!
  • kle4 said:

    kinabalu said:

    My new Lab membership card has a union jack on it. Grrr.

    And you wanted a St George's Cross?
    No, Hammer and Sickle.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 41,919
    HYUFD said:

    Good evening

    Another depressing day of atrocities in the Middle East with untold consequences

    Sunak and Starmer stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel while Palestinian supporters parade in London and Manchester

    An Egyptian guard opens fire on a tourist bus of Israelis killing some and their Egyptian guide

    An innocent German woman is kidnapped with unspeakable consequences for her

    British citizens are trapped in the conflict as well as other nationalities

    The conflict threatens to spread to other countries and all the time Ukraine is at war with Russia

    The bond market crisis threatens the world's economies and we have Biden or Trump as the choice for the US next year .

    We can argue over Sunak and Starmer, but can anyone name any politician anywhere they would put their trust in to handle the fallout from these concurrent crisis

    Not confirmed, Biden may still stand down and Trump could be in jail this time next year if convicted in any one of his criminal casesand a new GOP candidate selected
    Not Biden v Not Trump is a much underrated possibility imo. I have my betting skewed to make £££ if it happens.
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,851

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    I don't believe so, at all.

    The figures I've seen not coming from nutters almost all tend to show little change in figures.

    When it comes to "in a relationship" (which is not the same as having sex), then women have consistently been in relationships at a higher rate than men at younger age-groups, not just now but in the past too.

    Because its not unusual for men to have a relationship with a younger woman, but the reverse is less common. And that's not a modern development.
    The age thing is indeed a possible explanation for the discrepancy. As a 40 year old, I have recently dated a 24 year old and an 28 year old. Everyone shrugs. So what? Reverse that, and imagine I was a 40 year old woman...

    Yes, older men have always done well with younger women, tbh, I've done better in my 30s than I did in my 20s. What that doesn't change, is that there is a growing pool of angry, sexless young men aged 18-25ish who are easily radicalised and want to beat something up. Heck, the best of them get grifted by giving Andrew Tate 2000 bucks for a "course" to pick up girls. The worst of them go on disgusting, mad killing sprees.

    The problem is, the situation isn't static. It's quite clear from the stats that the number of sexless young men is increasing, statistically, significantly, year on year. And I put it to you that is a problem, because the world does not need a lot of angry young men with a lot to prove.
    I don't see any evidence whatsoever for a growing pool of angry, sexless young men.

    And if there are and they want to beat something, that's what their right hand is for.

    There's no excuse for any of this Tate nonsense.
    Unfortunately, I see evidence all over the show. The FT article I linked below, also academic articles like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0886260520959625 if you have access.

    I 100% agree with you, there's no excuse for Tate or his followers. My intent is to explain, rather than to excuse.

    Houellebecq basically nailed it in the mid 90s:

    “It's a fact that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

    The 21st century has seen the hyper-commodification and globalisation of the sexual marketplace - twenty years ago, you could date people you met through your social network, now, you download an app and can select anyone within a certain radius. And if you're a hot girl on instagram, well, 20 years ago, your hotness would have got you the hottest young guy in town on a friday night. Now, you post a few selfies and you're invited out to Mr Millionaire's yacht as an "influencer" etc.

    Globalisation, when applied to the sexual marketplace, leads to an extraordinary gini coefficient that would prompt serious debate if it were applied to incomes.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,658
    kyf_100 said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    Yes, and here's a link to another study by Morgan Stanley, that predicts "45% of women will be single and childless by 2030" https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/45-percent-women-are-expected-to-be-single-and-childless-by-2030

    In terms of marriage, unfortunately again we're talking about America, but the stats can't be that far off for the UK - 25% of people don't marry by 40. https://time.com/6291040/unmarried-40-single-economy-pew/

    I'm not trying to justify any of this, or make incel points on a political forum. What I'm saying is, grifters like Andrew Tate exist and thrive in the modern world for a reason, because they promise something that is increasingly out of reach. Young guys will do almost anything for the faintest chance of a girl, I know this, having been a young guy myself. So they fall into the thrall of the "take roids, make money, buy a bugatti" BS.

    I'm trying to explain why a grifter like Tate can achieve world stardom, not trying to justify it.
    I think that's important because too often the reaction is to just dismiss it, loftily pointing out going down that route is wrong and dumb.

    It's true that what he's selling is nonsense, but just saying that misses the problem of why so many people don't think it's nonsense.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094
    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    DavidL said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    The top 5% of women do not necessarily marry the top 5% of men. My wife, for example, married me.
    You are reasonably high earning, even if no Brad Pitt. So I imagine not too far from the top 5% career wise
    No Brad Pitt? For shame sir!
    I agree with Hyufd.

    Pitt's an ugly fucker. You're way better looking.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 12,329
    I have been off line for a bit. I suppose we have covered the fact that the Hamas attacks must be the greatest Israeli intelligence failure for decades. How is it possible they didn't know, prepare, plan and avert?
  • HYUFD said:

    Ugh. Just seen those beheading videos Leon mentioned. A 10 year old boy.

    Seriously.. how anyone can look at that and feel supportive of Palestine or Hamas I do not know.

    Hamas it seems are drifting towards ISIS, no wonder Netanyahu is responding so forcefully
    We were pondering this last night. Tbh I'm starting to wonder if the whole thing is not ISIS under a false flag.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094
    edited October 2023
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Aaaaaaaand.... now the inevitable beheading videos, live, on air

    I shall not link

    I wonder if @FrancisUrquhart is right and some ISIS members have drifted back to Hamas, or whether Hamas see ISIS as an inspiration

    This whole appalling episode feels like a catastrophe for the Palestinian cause, even in the midst of a military "victory"

    Of course: as I wrote yesterday, there is no possible way this can result in anything other than life in Gaza becoming even shittier.

    Which means that ordinary Gazans won't see any prospect of their life improving. Which means they see even less to lose by joining Hamas.

    Yesterday I said there was no solution. And, I think there is a solution.

    It would be incredibly expensive. It would require the cooperation of the Israeli government (which I suspect would be unforthcoming). But it is possible.

    Remember: the goal here is a prosperous Gaza.

    If Hamas is running Gaza, that won't happen. And if Israel is blockading Gaza, that won't happen.

    Someone else needs to go in and run Gaza. It needs to be occupied, and not by the Israelis. Just as the West administered both Japan and Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, we need something similar in Gaza.

    It needs to be a multinational force, and the Islamic world needs to step up and provide a chunk of the troops, while Europe and the US provide the remainder.

    Government needs to be in the hands of a benevolent dictator, whose job it is to make Gaza a wealthy place. It needs to be zero tax, low rent: build your Mediterrenean T-shirt factory there. It needs to have decent schools and a proper University.

    This will need to be the highest security place on earth. There will need to be tens and tens of thousands of troops on the ground. Hamas will need to be completely evicted from the Gazan political sphere. (Former members will need to either completely renounce violence, or be shipped off to wherever.)

    The goal here is nation building. It's a massive subsidy from the rest of the world to make Gaza a place where people dream of making millions, not of killing Israelis.

    To make this work, Israel will need to be willing to do things it currently does not. It will need to let Gaza have an airport and a port. It will have to trust the security guarantees from the rest of the world.

    And the rest of the world, will need to be willing to write an absolutely enormous cheque.
    LEaving aside the benefits to Gaza and Israel, it would be worth it just to piss off the Iranians though.
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,851
    kle4 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    HYUFD said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    Yes but the top 5% of men can ultimately only marry 5% of women (presumably also likely to be the top 5%).

    Leaving 95% of women outside that group for incels to marry. Even if in their 20s and early 30s it will be mainly the top 5% by looks and wealth getting most of the women to sleep with.

    Yes, and here's a link to another study by Morgan Stanley, that predicts "45% of women will be single and childless by 2030" https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/45-percent-women-are-expected-to-be-single-and-childless-by-2030

    In terms of marriage, unfortunately again we're talking about America, but the stats can't be that far off for the UK - 25% of people don't marry by 40. https://time.com/6291040/unmarried-40-single-economy-pew/

    I'm not trying to justify any of this, or make incel points on a political forum. What I'm saying is, grifters like Andrew Tate exist and thrive in the modern world for a reason, because they promise something that is increasingly out of reach. Young guys will do almost anything for the faintest chance of a girl, I know this, having been a young guy myself. So they fall into the thrall of the "take roids, make money, buy a bugatti" BS.

    I'm trying to explain why a grifter like Tate can achieve world stardom, not trying to justify it.
    I think that's important because too often the reaction is to just dismiss it, loftily pointing out going down that route is wrong and dumb.

    It's true that what he's selling is nonsense, but just saying that misses the problem of why so many people don't think it's nonsense.
    Yep. He's talking absolute nonsense and a snake oil salesman, but it's interesting to figure out why he has such a following. Why did Tate become a celeb? Look at what he's preaching, and to who. Seems like there's a hell of a lot of them out there. When sources like the FT say "there's a kernel of truth in this incel thing" for the young'uns, I sit up and listen.

    Just glad I'm an old(ish) bugger, tbh. I would not want to be a 20 year old kid today.

  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 21,743
    edited October 2023
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Foxy said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Hamas has some very strange bedfellows.

    I know it’s cliche to say “I did not have this on my bingo card” now but…I did not have “Andrew Tate sides with Hamas because he’s anti-vaxx” on my bingo card
    https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1710900729794174983

    My flint agent has teenage sons who love Andrew Tate (to her despair). He’s been pro Islamist for while, or so she tells me. They are proper god fearing family men and so on
    Tate is a grifter and always has been, I've a friend in common with him from before he got famous, back when he was just pushing $1200 "courses" that were essentially 30 min youtube clips. I have stories that are off the record and unpublishable, though actually a lot of it is public domain, e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/gammasecretkings/comments/10499m0/gsk_exclusive_i_screengrabbed_the_deleted_bobby/

    Unfortunately he has become emblematic of the pushback against so-called "toxic" masculinity. He's effectively the Che Guevara Poster for disaffected teens to early twenties completely ignored by their female counterparts, due to the globalization of dating practices, documented numerous times (did you know, for example, men outumber women on tinder by 10 to 1? That's not swipe, that's outnumber. Before the swiping).

    Men got pushed just so far, got told they were such pieces of shit, that they started rallying around genuinely toxic figures like Tate. I have no time for Tate or his compadres, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tate is the reaction to men being told they're toxic just for being men.
    Yes indeed

    The lad mags of the 90s were a reaction to the feminism of the 80s, which said: Looking at naked women is evil, liking football is boorish, everything male is dull or sexist, and on and on (and on)

    So the lad mags came out and said: Er, actually, we like looking at bare breasts (we're made that way), football is fun, drinking beer with your mates is a laugh, going to dangerous places and shooting things is a blast

    Then the lad mags really DID get boorish (at the beginning they were genuinely witty and fresh) and so the pendulum swang again

    And now here we are once more. A decade of everyone telling men they are shit and useless and maleness is poison, and we have the inevitable reaction: Andrew Tate

    The problem this time is that the pendulum swings are much more vicious and extreme; Loaded magazine was positively benign compared to Tate
    Or alternatively: Tate offers an 'easy' answer to the concerns of idiots. Being nice to women and others is actually quite hard, especially if you are a shit. Working hard at school and getting a better job is hard.

    Easier just to take what you want.

    Charlatans have sold easy answers since time immemorial. Tate is just continuing in the same manner (or, lack of manners...)
    Tate is actually a response to what we know is going on with dating at the moment, which we can verify through dating app data, i.e. about 1 in 10 men get picked to be in a relationship. Most teens to early twenties are "incels" now.

    His advice, fundamentally, boils down, to being "you need to be a top 1% male and even if you don't make it, if you follow my advice, you'll be top 10%". Go gym, take roids, make money, spend money, look flash. This, apparently (and I do remember from my own younger days) attracts girls.

    It's pretty weak sauce stuff, but if I was a 23 year old who'd never had a cloth tit, I'd probably be listening to him too.
    It's not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Those figures are skewed by Tinder clientele looking for short term flings.

    Both my boys have lovely girlfriends, and both met them through dating apps, and neither would be mistaken for film stars or gym hounds. They both are just nice caring people who treat women with respect and kindness. It really isn't a complicated formula.
    Small sample size.

    Even the FT says inceldom is a thing for the young'uns now.

    https://www.ft.com/content/4ab260b5-ce0b-4636-a819-4b10190290cb

    "One study found that a man in the top percentile of attractiveness receives 190 times more likes on dating apps than a man in the bottom 50 per cent.

    The result: a male elite is enjoying a sexual boomtime, even as incels proliferate. The top 5 per cent of men increased their number of sexual partners by 38 per cent in the decade to 2013, found the US National Survey of Family Growth. In short, disconcertingly, there’s a kernel of truth in the incel worldview."
    But it’s still not true that only 1 in 10 get a partner. Where did you get that from?

    If you want some UK figures, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291001
    Fair point, that is a half remembered Tweet I saw a while back I didn't save, so can't back that one up. But i have backed up everything else I've said with data from the FT / Pew Research Center.

    The fact that young men are having less and less sex year on year, while young women are having more or less the same, highly suggests the truth of the FT's assertion that the "top 5% of men" increased their number of sexual partners by 38% in the last few years, while "there is a kernel of truth" in the incel worldview. Not my words, the Financial Times.

    Edit, I should add: And this is why kids turn to grifters like Andrew Tate.
    I don't believe so, at all.

    The figures I've seen not coming from nutters almost all tend to show little change in figures.

    When it comes to "in a relationship" (which is not the same as having sex), then women have consistently been in relationships at a higher rate than men at younger age-groups, not just now but in the past too.

    Because its not unusual for men to have a relationship with a younger woman, but the reverse is less common. And that's not a modern development.
    The age thing is indeed a possible explanation for the discrepancy. As a 40 year old, I have recently dated a 24 year old and an 28 year old. Everyone shrugs. So what? Reverse that, and imagine I was a 40 year old woman...

    Yes, older men have always done well with younger women, tbh, I've done better in my 30s than I did in my 20s. What that doesn't change, is that there is a growing pool of angry, sexless young men aged 18-25ish who are easily radicalised and want to beat something up. Heck, the best of them get grifted by giving Andrew Tate 2000 bucks for a "course" to pick up girls. The worst of them go on disgusting, mad killing sprees.

    The problem is, the situation isn't static. It's quite clear from the stats that the number of sexless young men is increasing, statistically, significantly, year on year. And I put it to you that is a problem, because the world does not need a lot of angry young men with a lot to prove.
    I don't see any evidence whatsoever for a growing pool of angry, sexless young men.

    And if there are and they want to beat something, that's what their right hand is for.

    There's no excuse for any of this Tate nonsense.
    Unfortunately, I see evidence all over the show. The FT article I linked below, also academic articles like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0886260520959625 if you have access.

    I 100% agree with you, there's no excuse for Tate or his followers. My intent is to explain, rather than to excuse.

    Houellebecq basically nailed it in the mid 90s:

    “It's a fact that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

    The 21st century has seen the hyper-commodification and globalisation of the sexual marketplace - twenty years ago, you could date people you met through your social network, now, you download an app and can select anyone within a certain radius. And if you're a hot girl on instagram, well, 20 years ago, your hotness would have got you the hottest young guy in town on a friday night. Now, you post a few selfies and you're invited out to Mr Millionaire's yacht as an "influencer" etc.

    Globalisation, when applied to the sexual marketplace, leads to an extraordinary gini coefficient that would prompt serious debate if it were applied to incomes.
    Sorry but that's a load of nonsense.

    Hotness always meant some found it easier to hook up than others, but for people who want to there's still ways to do so.

    From days clubbing, people who were desperate to hook up but weren't "alphas" would do so later in the evening, as alcohol makes everyone progressively hotter anyway, and time means that those who already hooked up that night stop trying to too.

    So you don't hook up with the first person you see? So you don't end up in a yacht? So frigging what?

    I'm off the dating market and have been for about a decade and a half nearly, but I know plenty of men who still are and don't struggle to find partners to hook up with. Main thing with them is that they're prepared to sleep with anyone, not view "top" people only as worth sleeping with.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,094
    What's happened to Carlos Sainz?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 54,557
    North London erupts!
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,026
    'Boris Johnson's ex-wife Marina Wheeler is Labour's sex harassment adviser'
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67043606
  • ydoethur said:

    What's happened to Carlos Sainz?

    Fuel system problems with the car.
This discussion has been closed.