Du

Person on the left is a tenured professor at UC Berkeley. They live in a multi million dollar home that they bought in an era where housing was more affordable. They bike to campus, which is about ten minutes. They got tenure a few years ago, so they’ve taken their foot off the gas a bit. Adjuncts and postdocs do most of the grunt work.

Person on the right is an office worker in some random small city. They live about 30 minutes out by car from city center, where all the jobs are. They would have loved to have lived closer, but it was all her and her husband could afford. They were both much happier two years ago when things were still remote, but corporate forced RTO. There were also layoffs, so they are working more hours than ever.

This debate isn’t actually occurring face to face. Person on the right’s CEO just emailed a link out to the entire company of a lecture Person on the left was giving at a conference he was attending in palm springs. The same CEO sent out an email “apologizing on behalf of all men” after Trump won.

Way to avoid my point.

No you assholes choose any culture war thing as proof someone is a horrible person, and then act like heroes when you make fun of them like middle school mean girls.

Look you guys can keep doing this bullshit but I’m out.

This shit is immature and stupid. I also get the sneaking suspicion that a lot of this “resistance” shit is done by people who just want an excuse to be cruel.

Either way, it doesn’t work. A full decade of shitting on Trump and the end result is that he’s more popular than ever.

Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

I swear most of you are just assholes looking for manufacturer moral justification to bully people.

I didn’t have anything specific in mind, but a lot of this matches up based on the one episode I watched. There weren’t any sex scenes though.

The Air Nomad genocide happens within the first ten minutes, while Aang is on a walk or something. It’s billed as this super metal moment that shows you this isn’t for kids. However it looks so fucking cheap and is written so badly. I just sat there rolling my eyes.

To be fair, the online discourse part also didn’t match up. The show got good but not great reviews. Avatar is a lot more popular that most adaptations, especially among millennial bloggers who do these reviews. While there were the usual 9/10s, there were also a ton of reviews written by people who grew up watching the show that were just like “yeah this is disappointing in every way. I guess it’s okay if you didn’t watch the original show, idk you do you 5/10”. Because of the diversity of the original IP, there was no culture war BS either.

Honestly never heard of it lol.

So I’ve noticed that there are a lot of streaming movies and TV shows that match a lot of these patterns:

• IP is announced. Adaptation of extremely popular series with existing fanbase
• IP is billed as “adult” with “mature themes”
• Producer/Director goes on a podcast and compares IP to “Game of Thrones” a few weeks before release. Said comparison treats GoT as an ideal to aspire to instead of a cautionary tale.
• Producer/Director also insults existing fanbase for some reason
• IP is previewed to critics, gets amazing reviews
• IP comes out, and gets high streaming numbers day one
• Writing ends up being terrible
• Plot ends up being surface level, with all the subtly of the original adaptation cut out. This somehow is true now matter how basic the source material may seem
• Acting is terrible. There is at least one race swapped character, who they also butcher from a writing perspective
• VFX is terrible, and expensive scenes are cut out
• Costumes are terrible to the point where everything looks like shitty cosplay
• There’s a few violent scenes that are extremely gratuitous. VFX and writing are so bad that it’s comical instead of jarring
• There are a few random sex scenes thrown in. The sex scenes detract from the pacing of the story, and are blatantly thrown in so producers can brag about them
• Sex scenes tend to focus on the female form. If men are involved, they all are hairless and look like boy band members
• If it is a gay sex scene, it blatantly written by women and for women with an extremely limited knowledge of men as a whole
• In a few days, the Internet erupts with needlessly vitriolic discourse about said IP.
• A year post release, the show is essentially forgotten.

In that context it’s no surprise younger people don’t like sex scenes. It’s basically a canary for a low quality show and extreme toxicity.

Look I’m sorry but this is ridiculous. The type of people to not be able to afford $15/month most likely don’t have insurance, or even access to a pharmacy. While there isn’t any real data on the venn diagram of people having sex more than once a day and being too poor to afford an extra 50¢ per day for every extra sex session, but I suspect it is vanishingly small.

At some point this is just virtue signaling. It’s eyeroll inducing.

The condom part is silly.

Cost and availability aren’t barriers to condom usage. They sell 36 packs of condoms at Walmart for like $15. Basically every single convenience store sells them for prices that, while massively inflated, are pretty low in the grand scheme of things. Most college health centers give them out for free.

The reason people don’t wear them is because doing it raw just feels better.

Does anyone have the actual sales numbers for these things?

They are basically perpetually on sale at Aldi and other discount grocers. I feel like you don’t do that unless you’re hurting for sales.

I feel like in a few years Valve is gonna have another go at Steamboxes, and both Sony and Microsoft are going to end up being caught off guard.

Well duh that’s what they Keyblade is for

At this point you’re clearly intentionally misrepresenting what I’m saying so you don’t have to question your own beliefs in the slightest.

I feel you’re being disrespectful of my viewpoints, and intentionally being obstinate in refusing to understand them.

I am mad about toxic behavior that is justified by liberal rhetoric. It is more egregious when it comes to sexism, but that is not the only issue. These behaviors are upsetting to watch, and it is frustrating to live in an environment where this is not only justified but portrayed as moral.

This post is about the real world. As in, in person social interactions. That limits your options, and means you have to on some tolerate things that frustrate you or become a hermit.

I live in a city of moderate liberals. I am a nerdy college educated millennial. While I have made a choice to avoid the worst of it after witnessing a lot of things that just crossed the line for me, on some level I simply have to live with elements of liberal culture that I find toxic.

I have no idea where you live that you can find people that perfectly match your political/moral philosophy in such numbers where it’s possible to meet people and strike up friendships, but let me assure you that isn’t how it works where I live.

A lot of my friends are good people overall, but do or believe at least one thing that frustrates me. I consider that part of life. However there’s some line I have to draw. In my experience the type of people who are extremely vocal about being liberal and how morally awful conservatives behave in really shitty ways, but get away with it by leveraging progressive rhetoric.

I have made a decision that on some level that rhetoric is bullshit, and to not involve myself with people who do things that I think are beyond the pale regardless of their justification. That by definition means rejecting or displaying extreme skepticism in regards to some parts of liberal culture. Hence the “more conservative”. You seem hung up on the words conservative, so you can use the term “less liberal” if it makes you feel better. I am friends with a grand total of person who defines themselves as conservative in absolute terms.

What you’re saying makes sense in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in practice. The word that has defined politics since the mid 2010s is intersectionalism. There simply isn’t any sort of genuine political lane for, say, a socialist who hates #girlboss culture. I’ve actually watched the video you sent me and while I appreciate it, the opinion is rather niche. There isn’t really a corresponding political faction or identity to really latch on to.

I also personally haven’t experienced this lack of intersectionalism when I “touched grass”. In general there is such a tight coupling of all things political to the point where you can do things like guess someone’s opinion on the middle east by how they feel about bat roosts in suburban areas. To be fair, that has faded significantly since immediately post covid. However, it’s still strongly present. There simply aren’t people I meet in real life who espouse those kind of unique political values.

At the end of the day, I’m sort of in a rut. I can avoid certain people who behave in what I define as a toxic manner, but I can’t really avoid all of this toxicity in the context of modern society. Identity politics coding is everywhere, and on some level I need to “pick a side”.

I get where you’re coming from, but I think you misread my original post. I said more conservative.

Pretend the temperature is 0 degrees outside. The next week, it is thirty degrees warmer. Someone would be 100 percent correct in saying that it’s much warmer today than yesterday. However it would still be objectively cold.

That is what I am saying. I’m not conservative, but I am more conservative. I don’t see myself belonging to either group.

I also live in a liberal area of the country. I don’t really have to worry about running into someone who says homosexuality is a sin or a woman who isn’t white and pure on her wedding day is a whore. On the other hand I do run into women blatantly hate men or will leverage tolerance rhetoric to gaslight and cheat on their partners.

Look Trump is a uniquely awful candidate, but why should I be associated with liberals? I’m a Jewish man. In liberal culture sexism towards men is normalized and antisemitism is normalized.

There’s nothing stopping me from just coming up with my own philosophy while treating both liberal and conservative culture with skepticism. While right now that’s gonna be more on the liberal side, I don’t see why I should associate myself with people who normalize toxic behavior towards people of my religion/gender. That’s basically asking to be next on the target list.

I always bring up the ethical non monogamy because it’s the most objectively insane thing. It’s so obviously toxic and unfair. It would soon obviously be considered emotional abuse if genders were reversed. Yet the more liberal someone is, the more they’ll suggest I’m sexist for having an issue with that behavior.