So @catches_stars on Twitter is pretty hilarious. She’s also got an OkCupid account, and regularly posts snippets of her conversations with some of the more problematic dudes who contact her, some on her main Twitter account and some on @okcupid_TXT. With her permission, and because I’m too lazy to actually write a post today, I’m passing along a few of my favorites.
This overeager fellow has a rather sudden change of heart when his stated plan runs into an obstacle, that obstacle being that @catches_stars finds him completely repulsive.
This guy is either totally high or trying some weird and misguided PUA wizardry on her. (It does not succeed.)
This foot-obsessed fellow spammed her with the same message from several different accounts.
This guy, who seems to be shirtless in his profile pic, gets what I assume is, to him, a very disappointing answer.
As does this fellow.
Romance is hard.
@Some_Gal
Ah, you’re right, I had forgotten to consider that. It’s almost like when a child is born, the person actually going through the birth has different needs/obstacles. Huh.
Also, re: society rejecting abortion for social reasons, wasn’t there that article that support for Roe is higher than it’s been in years?
ALSO also, I like how “it’s just a theory!”*-Martyn managed to move his arguments/goal posts from convincing women [a monolith, obvs] to interact with men through manipulative “flirting” but in a totally light-hearted, no-pressure, HAPPY way of course**, to doubling down on eugenics sounding peachy (bold move. Terrible, ignorant, privileged, but unexpected), and now we’re at abortion! What a douchebag tool.
*I want to hear a response to the “Social Fruits” theory of the pray the gay away theory.
**Lastly, I believe in one of Martyn’s early comments, he listed all the BIG IMPORTANT BOOKS he read about the “theory of game”…which appear to be written by people who are supporters/creators of the theory. Yup, definitely unbiased source material. Imagine, people spinning something they made/use to sound really good IN THEORY.
@leftwing fox
It was a thing of beauty anyway. Well said!
@leftwingfox
Where did applied genetic testing for disease and genetic defects originate? Sorry but without eugenics, humanity would have been very far behind compared to where we are today with it.
Well, in theory you could breed away various traits in human beings. It would probably be possible to agree, without being ableist or anything, that certain traits are bad. Phobias, for instance, aren’t fun to have. Anyone is better off without them. Joint problems, proneness to infections, allergies or cancer, not fun either. I mean, you could probably make a non-ableist list of both mental and physical traits that are just bad, and that have SOME genetic component to them, meaning they can be affected by breeding programs.
Now, suppose we close the borders of, say, Sweden. Anyone who gets pregnant before the some specified age is forced to abort. At the age in question, everyone must go through a number of mental and physical tests. Anyone who flunks the tests OR has several flunked close family members (this is necessary if one wants to get proper results when breeding for traits with low heritability, which probably goes for all traits one would want to select for) is sterilized.
After a couple of hundred years or so we’d be, in general, better, regarding the targeted traits. And there wouldn’t really be any inbreeding problems, as someone mentioned, not even in the long run. We started with nine million people in my example – you could easily cut off huge percentages of this population and it would be perfectly fine from an inbreeding standpoint.
OBVIOUSLY THIS IS STILL COMPLETELY IMPRACTICAL AND CRAZY. Sweden would have to be a rigid dictatorship to pull this off, of a kind that nobody wants to live in. But something like the above is what it would take to get proper results on traits with low heritability. All eugenicists so far have just failed to incorporate the vast knowledge we have from animal breeding into their plans – they’ve just weirdly thought that we can sterilize one person here and one person there as we happen to stumble across some trait we consider “bad”, but even disregarding all the racism and ableism that has always been part of eugenics, that just isn’t how breeding works.
@Martyn
Do you even know what ableism is? You are disgusting. It is not a net win to have fewer people with genetic diseases. Unless you think there should be fewer people like me, fewer people like a good friend’s sister? People are not better or worse than others because of their genetics. People are better or worse than others because they do things like support feminism/womanism/etc. (Better) or eugenics (Worse).
Sorry, wrote you could “breed away” certain traits, but that isn’t right; traits that depend on many different genes plus environmental factors can’t be eradicated, but one can affect their average occurrence quite a lot through breeding programs. Anyway, main point: Eugenics, just not practically feasible even disregarding the ethical problems.
By what measure? Behind what? If you’re gonna make a claim this broad, you ought to back it up.
This is actually getting really upsetting because my friend has been posting about the beautiful artwork his sister with Down Syndrome did and the awesome art made by other people with “genetic defects” that he saw at an exhibit. It is so gross to think that these people are seen as a net loss to society.
@pseudo_star_17
I used it as a definition-based example to demonstrate a balanced definition when compared to an unbalanced one. I never intended for it to be any more than that.
I really want to avoid ruffling anymore feathers with game talk but… game itself isn’t a strategy, it’s a theory that strategies are based on.
I very muchly agree with the description “to wear down resistance from women through micro-aggressions” if you apply it to The Neg. The Neg and “embedded commands” are actual strategies based on game. Game is still just a theory which strategies are based on, not a strategy itself.
Obviously, it is wrong even if my friend’s sister weren’t incredibly talented, but it just makes it more tear-inducing to think that I shouldn’t have seen her art because we would be better off without her.
Martyn, do you have any examples of anyone else using “Game” to refer to a ~theory~ rather than a practice? I don’t think a lot of people split those hairs as finely as you do.
Re selective abortion, well, that’s another matter than breeding. It would, of course, be possible to more or less eradicate down’s syndrom or some other condition that can be tested for if everyone always tested for this and aborted if the fetus had it. AND it’s a big debate whether a person who does test and then abort if zie finds out there’s something wrong with the fetus is necessary ableist for doing so. Obviously you wouldn’t do this unless you thought the very CONDITION was bad in SOME sense, but does this somehow imply that you think PERSONS who HAVE the condition are worth less than others? I don’t think so, but I also think it’s almost impossible to have people selecting away fetuses with a certain condition at a LARGE SCALE without this affecting the attitudes against actual living people who have that condition.
AND at the same time, free abortion means women are free to abort for any reason. Including, for instance, feeling that a baby with down’s syndrom would be too hard to care for.
I know a woman who tested for down’s syndrom and was going to abort if she found out the baby had it, because she has a close relative with down’s syndrom, whom she loves dearly, but whom has also had loads of problems in zir life due to having downs, and she felt she couldn’t deal with being the mother of another down’s syndrom person in the family. I don’t think she’s ableist, but I can totally see why it’s problematic that so many people simultaneously make this choice, and how people might actually feel pressure to test for downs and abort if the fetus has it.
@ Dvärghundspossen
But some phobias go alongside other mental illnesses and I personally wouldn’t want to get rid of people with those for obvious reasons. I like that I am who I am and all that my genetic makeup is contributes to that. (I am not sure that my fear of spiders and to a lesser extent all bugs is quite at phobia-levels, but I think it is.)
Martyn: stop telling people what to use. Just stop being an obnoxious fucknut.
FUCK OFF.
@Martyn
We need better social structures in place so that the extra challenges of raising a child with any differences doesn’t fall so heavily on a single parent or family. I don’t blame anyone for not being able to handle it, but the fact that people feel that way is wrong. (And if we were less ableist as a society, adoption would be seen as more of an option and some women might choose that.)
Martyn is what happens when an NWO goes to college.
Apologies if my comment was unclear. It is, of course, okay to feel that way, but we should work to make sure as few people as possible feel that way.
He’s either trolling at this point, or eugenetically predisposed to be unable to comprehend science. Given either of these hypotheses, the only reasonable response is cute kittens.
I’m on my phone, so cute kitties are sadly beyond me right now. Pity the Deo!
Kitties!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD8yLILzU2w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw4KVoEVcr0
Some Gal: Maybe I should say first that I have mental illness, and I think it’s so deeply entrenched in my personality that I wouldn’t really be me if I hadn’t had this condition.
HOWEVER, this is a bit like the debate where some guy wanted David to admit that abortion is bad, because OMG if your mother had had an abortion you wouldn’t have existed! No, obviously not. But if I had never existed, then I wouldn’t regret not existing either, because there would be no “I” doing the regretting. And some other person would probably have existed in my place.
If someone were to tell me that they could make me completely normal by the wave of a magic wand, I might say no, because then I wouldn’t be me anymore. That doesn’t mean that it would have been a net loss to the world (or even more absurdly to myself) if I had never existed in the first place, but some other, mentally healthy, person had existed in my place.
Maybe some mental illnesses are somehow connected to valuable traits like creativity (I think there is some research that suggests this), meaning that if a breeding program turned out to have the negative side effect of also decreasing the amount of a positive trait in a population, it would have to be rethought. This happens occasionally in animal breeding, and isn’t necessarily a problem, if you just evaluate your program often and carefully enough (which, granted, people may be reluctant to do if they’ve invested lots of time and money in certain breeding animals).
I DON’T think that anyone would miss mental illness PER SE. If it were the case, in the future, that everyone is mentally healthy, it’s not like people would go around yearning for all the awesome mentally ill individuals that never got a chance to be born. There would be, probably just as awesome, mentally healthy people in their place!
So I think SOME problems people bring up with eugenics thought isn’t really problems… BUT even if you make the most charitable possible interpretation, it’s still practically impossible and terribly undesirable to create that kind of extremely controlling dictatorship that would be required to carry out an actually effective breeding program on human beings.
Please someone tell me what I am doing wrong. I have trouble getting the link from the youtube site because I am on mobile, but this copy-paste from where I found the videos isn’t working either. And the kitties were so cute. (Although I am still a little sad about not getting the Grouch Anthem clip to work last night.)
Youtube link monster is mean. 🙁
@ Dvärghundspossen
I personally think that having a variety of different perspectives enriches the world and that, while no one would necessarily miss anything per se, the world would be a little bit less awesome for having fewer people who experience the world differently. I think I understand what you are saying now and agree that, if we could agree on “bad,” it would still be impossible.
I just disagree that we could agree on “bad,” but I think your point is a good one.
@Martyn
But your definition WASN’T “balanced”. It was positive, a bit congratulatory, and even felt a bit nostalgic. Again, you are coming up with your definition based on the views of people who created/support game as theory and practice. They are not going to give a “balanced” view especially because they are *just trying to sell you their books*. AND, If your definition is incomplete it is not balanced, it is at best misleading.
To give an example, a lot of racists who want to use the n-word (without being called racist) say “well, the ORIGINAL DEFINITION doesn’t say what race blah blah.” But any dictionary that gives only a semantic definition of racial slurs, without mentioning how demeaning they are, is giving an incomplete and IMbalanced definition, misleading people into thinking “it’s just a word”. It’s erasure and minimization and semantics, which let lazy-thinking, armchair philosophers pretend they are above the real world applications/history of the theories they discuss.
It is no coincidence that the people who want to just focus on these theories (game, eugenics) like they’re an intellectual exercise are people who have EXTRAORDINARY amounts of privilege, because they’re not victims of institutionalized, systemic oppression that they cannot escape from. “Game” can never be “just a theory” to women because we get to deal with the practices it “inspires” WHETHER WE WANT TO OR NOT. People of color and people with disabilities aren’t going to see eugenics as “just a theory” because it was used to try and wipe them out and they are STILL dealing with that fallout. But once again, none of these things are as important as a white guy being free from criticism to endlessly pontificate about things he will never experience and therefore knows nothing about.
You’re a privileged, ignorant, entitled asshole, Martyn. I feel bad for all women, POC, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA people who are unfortunate enough to have you in their lives.
@hellkell
So it’s fair to use outdated data? Fuck off is it!
@Some Gal
I am aware of the term ‘ableist’, I do not believe anyone should be discriminated against for any disabilities they acquire. I believe it’s difficult to be anything but ableist when living in a capitalist society. Overall, I think people deserve the right to choose whether to bring someone into a world where they will be at such a severe disadvantage they’d encounter more suffering than joy. I know society has come a long way in terms of making the lives of severely disabled (“severely handicapped” to use the more precise term) more enjoyable, but there comes a point where potential parents must make a responsible, informed choice.
I spent a year working with both physically and mentally disabled people working at an IT-related charity which tried to provide their volunteer workers with a semblance of fair working life. Society doesn’t enough to provide more severely disabled people with an equivalent life to those who are more able IMHO.
*was used and IS still used against these populations (third paragraph correction, didn’t want to make it sound like these practices are just in the historical dustbin).
Also, regulars, how do I do italics?