Good article?

The comments that formed the basis of the complaints against Dr. Peterson included comments on a podcast in which he commented on air pollution and child deaths by saying “it’s just poor children…”

This quote is the most disgusting out of context character assassination I've seen in a long time.

I got suspicious because while Jordan does say things that women and/or trans people often find deplorable. I know that he's a strong supporter of the poor (at least in rhetoric) and as a family man I assume of children as well.

The full context can be found on Spotify. Episode #1769 of "The Joe Rogan Experience" start from about 15:30. He's the one that brings up how 7 million poor children die from indoor particulate pollution. Joe doesn't believe him and gets a fact check, which eventually leads to Jordan sarcastically saying "Well, it's just poor children, and the world has too many people on it anyway..."

It's such an insane mischaracterization of what he said, you can't take the article seriously. Probably would have to write off the entire website that article is from, honestly.

So, it's his usual strategy then. Make all sorts of conflicting statements with conflicting messages so that each supporter can believe that he's genuinely speaking for their interests but that trump is simply lying to all the other supporters that have conflicting interests.

It's a monday. So that's already more like 1 in 52. There's been like 5-20 news worthy "return to work" announcements in the past year, I'm guessing half othem have mandatory 2 days, the other half have mandatory 3 days.

Multiply that by the number of things that happen in your life where a coincidence of this level could happen and you should be seeing this kind of coincidence a many times each year.

If banks hold 100% of the money and lend it all out x10 (fractional reserve) and earn 1% interest, the money supply is growing by 10% per year.

You've got it backwards.

Banks hold other people's money and use it to issue loan. It's the issuance of loans that creates money. The fractional reserve doesn't magically multiply the money. It just (in a roundabout way) allows banks to loan up to that multiplier of money to people. But that only works if there's people who want to borrow that money.

If a bank earns 1% interest, that doesn't grow the money supply. It transfers money from the people that borrowed the money to the bank which then uses it to pay executives, shareholders and employees (in that order of priority).

The higher the interest rates, the less money people can afford the borrow, the more the money supply shrinks.

Banks HATE high federal reserve rates, because that means people don't borrow as much which means they don't make as much money.

When business and the wealthy class get richer, they want to get even RICHER. Prices rise. Which drives record profit, which makes rich people wealthier, which causes the cycle to repeat.

This can only happen in a poorly regulated environment where the rich setup monopolies or oligopolies. Otherwise they'd lose all their customers if they raise prices.

We just need proper incentive structures and regulation. But seeing as nobody has the guts to start figuring that out, the only lever we have is interest rates.

I think you're just speaking for yourself here. Before you start spreading misinformation on the internet, maybe you should find the guts to actually figure out what you're talking about.

High federal reserve rates can make things difficult for banks and that might be why the CEO of JP Morgan is butt hurt right now.

Want to deal with inflation? Raise interest rates.

Want to really improve the population's purchasing power? Break up the monopolies and oligopolies.

It's when you're dealing in an official capacity or speaking to a broad audience or when you don't know the person's culture.

The CEO saying Merry Christmas to his 140 employees, when 5 of them are Jewish is going to be not feel so great for those 5 Jewish people. Happy Holidays should be fine for everyone.

But if you know the person is Christian (or celebrates Christmas) it should be perfectly fine to tell them Merry Christmas.

Of course in some places that may be considered insensitive because a Jewish person might be hearing it. Which is absurd and that level of sensitivity is not acceptable IMO.

Isn't the Gaza hospital at the very least confirmed to have been a relatively minor explosion in the parking lot?

The modern political left has become extremely anti-egalitarian on the gender axis: they discriminate against men.

And they do it relatively openly, though they rarely, if ever, explicitly admit to it and they often claim to be gender egalitarians.

But if you're going to make a post talking about the misandry found in the left, without mentioning the equal amounts of misandry found on the right, then I find that to be a little disingenuous.

Many of men's greatest issues like effective access to mental health care, effective social safety net, accessible and welcoming social environments of neurodivergent men etc... Are all things that are being fought against by the right.

This is going to be speculative, but when you recognize the amount of money in government and how the left has historically been trying to provide social safety nets for everyone, you can see that this creates certain social pressures. If there's a lot of money in helping people, then there's going to be a feedback loop of people financially interested in promoting even more investments in helping people.

The right tends to stand in opposition to this. And what the left has learned is that while the right will be willing to burn everything down just to stop a tiny little welfare project that helps everyone, it turns out that if this welfare project only helps women, then the right won't stand in its way, it may even be supportive of it. This has created a massive industry that focuses on helping only women. Some of the money involved ends up for the promotion of misandrist ideologies that help to legitimize programs that help exclusively women, because that's where the money is.

My perspective is that leftist type people want to help men and women equality. But the right makes it impossible. Over time, this situation combined with the sustained power of money has warped leftist ideology away from what they'd ideally want to see.

The right is just as much to blame for all this as the left. I would argue it is even more to blame for it.

Hopefully it will be like the subreddits he moderated. They turned out quite nicely. Unapologetically advocating for men from an egalitarian perspective while also being unapologetic about defending against the misandrist detractors, a large number of whom call themselves feminists and leverage feminist ideology.

I'm not claiming this is right or wrong. But here's the justification.

The criminal justice system is there to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred. When it comes to distinguishing consensual sex from rape, it's nearly impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt, because it ends up being just she said, he said. One tactic is to show a pattern of multiple victims. So if multiple victims independently come forward with a similar story of sexually predatory behavior, then you have compelling evidence that might be enough for "beyond reasonable doubt".

What this means is that, in principle, rapists can just start raping left and right and keep getting away with it. At least for a while. I don't claim here anything about how frequent or rare these rapists may be.

This can make life untenable for rape victims on university campus, in that they will not be able to keep going to class in the same room as the person that raped them. This creates even more injustice beyond just that of being victim of a crime that you can't prove, because they'll be forced to forego their studies.

So that's the justification given for why, morally, we need something that's a bit easier than "prove beyond reasonable doubt" that will make it possible for the victim to continue their studies. Legally, Title IX, along with a lot of acrobatics, provides the legal framework to force universities to do something about it.

In practice, it seems that at least in some universities you end up with a complete joke of a system. Universities are completely ill equipped to adjudicate such a complex situations. The whole thing is extremely politicized. The outcome of the investigation seems to be heavily based on the gender of the accuser and accused as well as political connections to the people involved in the process.

Regardless of if the previous is true or not. Not being allowed to cross-examine the accuser in a she-said he-said situation seems completely insane.

Personally, I think one party consent for legal recordings (recordings that can only be used for legal purposes in criminal proceedings) should become the norm world-wide. Then catching these rapists is going to be so easy that there won't be any need to even think about these kinds of kangaroo courts.

I just don't have time to do a proper response right now. I think pretty much everything you've said is incredibly helpful and I can only speak for myself here, but I hope you stick around.

Except one thing. Blaming it all on the patriarchy. I'm pretty sure that it's not your intent, but I think this is not a good thing to do, especially when speaking to a vulnerable man. I'm sure you have your definition of what the patriarchy is and that it clarifies why what you said is perfectly reasonable, but from the perspective of a vulnerable man hearing "patriarchy" this and "toxic masculinity" that (which to your credit, you didn't say the latter), rationally or not leads many to start seeing masculinity itself as problematic. Which for vulnerable men, especially those with anxiety issues leads to self loathing and a lot worse problems down the road.

Frankly, I think, when trying to help vulnerable men, you should make sure to keep feminist ideology out of it. Otherwise you risk making things worse, not in a big hit, but in a death of a thousand cuts kind of way.

Does that make sense?

You are correct.

Especially in this case I probably judged GravyMan prematurely. He's using detailed definitions and explanations which I usually attribute to "Academic types" who have years of in depth experience in the topic and can't possibly be completely blind to the double standards present within feminism. But looking back, his statements are more like feministm 101 type statements, so it's actually believable that he just doesn't have any in depth understanding of what he's talking about.

So I definitely should have taken a far more charitable approach.

Alright, I'll give this another go because I'm pretty disappointed in my previous response.

You're addressing four points here. Three of them have to do with what Feminism is or does.

The video makes some pretty strong claims about this, but the presentation of the video is so boring I can't force myself to watch it again, so I don't remember how solid the evidence to back it up was.

I take the stance that Feminism is quite a large movement, and no one person or organization can objectively claim specifically what it is and what it stands for. Not the guy in the video, and not you either.

So generally speaking, I consider debating what Feminism is or isn't to be a waste of time. That's why I didn't address any of these points in my other reply.

However, I do currently hold the belief that misandry is very widespread among self-identified feminist (regardless of whether you or anyone else would acknowledge them as feminist).

There are also a plethora of concepts, ideas or ideological structures promoted by self identified feminist individuals and feminist organizations that create misandrist outcomes such as government programs that discriminate against men, institutional endeavors that discriminate against men, law enforcement practices that discriminate against men, laws that discriminate against men, etc....

One of these ideological structures that help promote discrimination against men is found in your point that discusses patriarchy. It's just textbook "Apex fallacy". You point to the people at the top and it can then be used to make sweeping generalizations about everyone else. You look at the couple thousand people at the top and say "Look! it's mostly men", but then you look at the hundreds of thousands of people who are at the bottom and it's also mostly men, but you don't notice them. And when policies and laws are enacted to "balance the gender scales", the men at the top stay and the top and the men at the bottom are the ones who pay the price. E.g. Legislation that creates domestic violence shelters for women, shelters that also defacto serve as homeless shelter. These are homeless shelters for women only, when the vast majority of people who need homeless shelters are men.

The concept of patriarchy refers to a social system in which men hold primary power and women are marginalized. While the degree and manifestation of patriarchy may vary across cultures and societies, if you examine a list of presidents, CEOs, top academics, and billionaires it's difficult to conclude women are given equal treatment-unless you genuinely believe women are inferior, and so have achieved less.

Ugh, new forum, same old story. And I just don't have the patience of go through yet another rabbit whole with yet another pseudo-academic online feminist.

I've done it enough that I've given up hope on breaking through all that brainwashing. I reply to you, but not for you. This reply is for anyone else reading this who still has the capability of independent thought.

"men hold primary power": There's multiple interpretation of that phrase, and feminists leverage this to both claim that patriarchy is everywhere and imply that it creates inequality in favor of men. Once you disambiguate the phrase, you quickly find out that both are rarely true at the same time.

Specifically:
A) "men hold primary power" means that men as a class wield the power of how society function. They, as a class, make the rules. And they do so only understanding their own needs and desires and as a result, they rule to the benefit of men at the expense of women.

The opposite interpretation is:
B) The positions of authority are held by men, but they do not wield this authority on their own behalf, they wield it on behalf of stakeholders where one the most important of which is women. As a result the authorities create a society that primarily oppresses men to the benefit of women.

So feminists like GravyMan like to go around claiming that we live in a patriarchy by mentioning male billionaires, top politicians etc... And then usually they imply that this means that there is inequality that favors men and oppresses women. They usually only imply it because this gives them wiggle room to wiggle out of the claim. Here he didn't straight out claim a direct link of inequality he just said "it's difficult to conclude [the opposite]", but that's a difficult one to wiggle out of.

So yes, obviously, the prevalence of men in positions of power implies that we live in some kind of patriarchy for some definition of patriarchy. But the question is: which definition is the one that applies to our society?

And if you look at the rates of completed suicide, the rates of homelessness, the rates of homicide victims and more recently post secondary education. Then contrast this with social efforts to help victims of violence, suicide risks, education opportunities that are gendered for the benefit of women. It becomes quite clear that we're far closer to definition B) than we are to definition A).

Furthermore, people like me, who are concerned with the general trend of callousness towards men and accompanying misleading ideology that takes away empathy and aid resources from those men, we don't like the term "Patriarchy". We see how it is misused to imply things that are not true about the way society function. And we see how it's definition is so malleable and routinely exploited to the detriment of men. So we try to condemn its use wherever we see it.

While I agree with OPs three other points. I don't generally like to spend much time on them. I think ideas are more important than labels.

And at the end of the day there is just one core concept that can unravel all of the misandry found within feminism. And I can summarize it in a simple question:

What happened to your empathy and compassion for men?

I have no problem with these terms. Toxic masculinity is a descriptive term for a harmful set of behaviors. It’s good to have descriptive terms.

Ok so it doesn't bother you... Who cares? It bothers ME and many other men. For comparison, the N-word doesn't really bother me personally in of itself. But I don't use it, I wouldn't tolerate anyone else using it in my presence because I know how much it bothers other people and what it means to them.

When it comes to "Toxic Masculinity". I personally find this terminology EXTREMELY insulting, reductive and I think it's harmful to the general gender discourse. If you have any empathy in you, I'd like you to consider trying to use alternatives. And I'm far from the only one who feels this way. Seriously, I find that terminology truly disgusting.

Someone who generalizes “toxic masculinity” to all male behavior is just wrong, and would be with or without the term.

Yes, and that's another huge problem. People get things wrong all the time. And in this case it can actually be quite harmful. All I'm asking is that you use less pejorative terminology.

And one of the weirdest thing with this one is the irony.

So I just did a web search for what is toxic masculinity. According to that page, one of the defining traits is this one:

Antifeminity: This involves the idea that men should reject anything that is considered to be feminine, such as showing emotion or accepting help.

Men in general will be averse to expressing their concerns because they're worried it will make them appear weak, emotional or feminine.

That's why it's so important for those of us engaged in the gender discourse to choose our terminology in an empathic and considerate manner.

It’s good to have descriptive terms.

And that is also my point. "Toxic" is not descriptive. Go search online for the word and I guarantee you that you'll find a ton of stuff trying to sell you useless things an mischaracterizing how bad the thing they're trying to "cure" really is and mischaracterizing in what way that thing is bad.

"Toxic Masculinity" is ripe for misinterpretation and I would never qualify it as being "descriptive".

Harmful gender expectations is descriptive. It's true that it may not be appropriate for all circumstances where someone might use "Toxic Masculinity" and that's a good thing. It's because it actually is a descriptive term, whereas "Toxic Masculinity" is kinda of an amorphous catch all term. It is not descriptive.

To put it in a different context. Let's say someone mentions "The problem of lazy Mexicans". And I tell him, please don't say that: it's racist. And the guy replies:

You misunderstood me. I was in no way implying that Mexicans are lazy. I was talking about a very well researched phenomenon that due to a combination of cultural and climate influences many Mexicans find themselves adopting a set of counterproductive behaviors. There is ample research on this and what steps can be taken to go from a lazy Mexican to a prosperous Mexican.

Unfortunately, changing habits and long held traditions is psychologically difficult to accept even when the benefits are so clear. This is why so many Mexicans seem to be focusing on the terminology instead of the actual discourse as some kind of ego defense mechanism.

Other than those reactionary Mexicans no one interprets it this way. So we're not going to start rewriting all of our literature just for this.

The label "feminism" refers to a massive, multifaceted, many-decades-long field of study and discourse, full of differing perspectives and internal disagreements and discussions.

But they all agree to at the very least use wording to imply that men are to blame for everything.

And while it's true that different factions will have different perspectives, the one perspective that is never properly accounted for is the one of self-respecting men.

So while it's impossible to nail down a clear and complete position held by Feminism, it's misandrist impact on society is very clear. This is the natural consequence of constructing an ideology focusing on women's well being without real concern for men's wellbeing for decades.

I just don't understand the logic here. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of abolishing the Duluth Model and the requirement to incarcerate someone on a domestic violence call.

But neither this situation, nor the story you linked to seems to have much to do with that policy.

In both situations, the police acted completely out of bounds. It is a completely different problem.

The story on the website was written in 2014 about an incident that happened in 1999, that's almost 25 years ago. It can't be considered relevant today. If there's a real systemic problem of this kind, you should have at least a dozen cases like this every single year.

Hopefully, in this most recent case we'll get some body cam footage released so we find out what really happened.

And also hopefully, the body cams is what will put this guy off the force forever. It's the second time he seems to have done something like this, but I'd bet that the first time, body cams were not standard practice yet.

Seems to me that the solution to stop this kind of thing from being a common problem is body cams, and that's what we have.

I suggest you use the terminology "harmful gender expectations" it's a bit more of a mouthful and it's less catchy. But then again the reason "toxic masculinity" is catchy is because it creates a strong negative emotional reaction in a discussion that should be intellectual or empathetic.

Why is it that practically everyone I interact with on kbin is basically an irony machine. Are you at least self aware of the irony. Or is it just something you do instinctively?

One of my points is that all of these things are things that SHOULD bother you but men tend to downplay or refuse to let it bother them out of some sort of bravado.

So saying that this doesn't bother you makes it seem to me like you didn't understand what I said or didn't make it clear enough.

If you disagree with my point that this is something that should bother you, then please explain why.

Because if you're not going to be constructively contributing to the conversation then why are you even saying anything?

Edit: changed machismo to bravado. It's more accurate.

Also. PS:

I change my mind, it's not something that should bother you. You're perfectly entitled to be bothered or not bothered by whatever it is you damn well please.

But it is something that bothers many men. It is something that I believe many men are bothered by without being particularly self aware of. And insist that it is something that needs to be addressed to help society move forwards to more egalitarian outcomes and hopefully just generally more harmonious relationships between different people.

Make it do they have to have it, to be able to loan it

The banks do have to have it to be able to loan it.

Fractional reserve says that they're not allowed to loan all of it.

So if you deposit 100k at the bank and there's a 10% fractional reserve. Then they're only allowed to loan 90k.

Now you might ask, so if the bank can only loan 90% of the money they have where does the money multiplier come from?

If person A comes and deposits 100k, and the bank loans 90k to person B. Then there's still only 100k in cash, but now there's 190k in bank accounts.

So every time someone comes in to deposit 100k, they loan out 90k. Once they've got 1,000k, they've loaned out 900k and keep 100k cash in reserve.

The important difference here is that loan only happen when there's a borrow. And there are strict regulations about how reliable those loans can be. Which is why they tend to require collateral.

So, really when a bank has 1,000k in people's account, it only has 100k in cash. But it also has 900k in houses, cars and furniture.

The whole system ends up stabilizing the value of money because it is backed by real tangible things through the loaning and collateral system.

I also think it helps to keep money at a stable but small rate of inflation (1-2%). Otherwise people will just hoard the cash instead of growing the economy in the form of investments. But I don't know what the literature says on that topic, or how reliable that literature is, in practice.

My point is, getting rid of the whole system just because it looks complicated to you seems like a terrible idea.

Like our focus should be on breaking up monopolies, progressive taxation and a solid well funded social support system. I think it's safe to leave the management of the money supply to the bean counters for now. It's clearly not perfect but it's not bad either.

Contrary to your perspective here, I think it is useful to examine the social context, including how gender is systemically wielded to reinforce power structures that were designed to support the lifestyles of a select few. Living in a patriarchal society doesn't mean you inherently benefit simply by being a man. It's more about putting you into a box so you behave as expected and perform the roles pushed onto you. Having narrow definitions of masculinity or femininity and strictly defined gender roles (no crossing over!) are a big part of building and maintaining those boxes for everyone.

This is not contrary to my perspective. I completely agree with this. I disagree with naming the cause of this problem "patriarchy". I consider this to be engaging in victim blaming.