So I found an … intriguing Instagram dude calling himself patriarchal_phenomenon, and it seems like he’s got a lot of very useful advice for both men (who want to spend their lives alone) and women (who want to be miserable).
Let’ take a look, shall we?
“If he doesn’t control you, then he doesn’t care for you”
Never marry a woman who believes in gender equality, because they belong on the streets.
Watch out for those devious feminist witches! Who are actually men!
“Say no to your wife’s whimsical desires.”
Don’t let her be a cog in the capitalist machine. Make her a cog in your machine!
“Man leads, woman feeds.”
Ladies! If you’re a bad wife, don’t be shocked if your man leaves you for the maid.
Huh, this is an interesting graphic to choose for this post,
Forget the red pill. Every post from this guy is a giant red flag.
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Yay, Elaine!
@Elaine the witch
Yay for medicine that works!
@Alan Robertshaw:
I don’t recall making such a choice. Or even being consulted on it …
Meanwhile, though, the virus was supposed to die down to being a usually-mild, seasonal thing akin to the flu that a healthy adult needn’t fear, as immunity built up in the population. (And, of course, that’s precisely what the 1918 flu did after that first year or so of mayhem.) Why is it either failing to do so or doing so much more slowly than it was supposed to?
Oh, so the patriarchs have to control the pets now, too? My parents’ puppy seems to listen to my mom much more than my dad. (I mean, insofar as he listens to anybody – he’s just four months old now, so he’s still a little chaos demon.)
One Victorian poem had the same idea. It was called “The Angel in the House” and apparently it was “largely ignored upon publication.” Perhaps women were suspicious of the sentiment “you’re my beloved angel, now do what I say” back in the 1850s too.
@Surplus: In short? There are many predictions that didn’t turn out to be true. It isn’t the same virus as the 1918 flu, so we get different results. It absolutely sucks.
@Alan: Interesting article on the cross-species contamination. The idea that the barriers between humanity and animal habitats is deteriorating is also worth considering. These pandamics are likely to become more common.
@Surplus: has it ever occurred to you that you may not be the main character?
^
This
Surplus, you do appear to have stopped mistreating the regulars around here, which is good. Though, iirc, David to threaten to put you on moderation before that happened.
The way you think sometimes is just so…so flawed, at a fundamental level. And the regulars here shouldn’t have to spend time and energy explaining the same things to you over and over again.
Nequam really put it best: stop acting like you’re the main character in some worldwide drama; it’s annoying, exhausting, and slightly offensive.
Not to argue with anyone, and I apologize for the following rant, but I’m going to take a different tact here.
I am angry at the state of the world too. Last night I wanted to post a total meltdown here for lack of anywhere else, but was too worked up to settle down and collect my thoughts long enough to do so. I wanted to scream and throw something through a window, punch kittens and kick puppies.
Yes, this has a lot to do with Covid and everyone’s steadfast refusal to actually do anything about it. I have had so much trouble in my life, depression, childhood trauma, I feel I only started to get over it and try to change things only a few months before the pandemic began.
Despite everything I want, I have been doing the right thing, trying to stay home, wear a mask, got vaccinated, etc, but it feels like pissing in the wind when everyone else keeps doing all the things I have never really done and want to do and prolonging the whole affair. Not to point fingers at anyone here, but like I imagine Surplus feels, it is not exactly soothing to hear “Just wait” from people who have already lived and experienced the things I want. People who have friends and family, relationships, etc, I have not had, that they have right now as they tell me things like “Life is short”, “You can’t live in fear”, so on and so forth.
Add in we basically need to completely eliminate coal in three years and knowing that simply will not happen, and no amount of waiting will fix that… Myanmar is still in the middle of a civil war, the Middle East is… well, business as usual, we all know about Ukraine… Hell, I’m just waiting for the anouncement Palpatine has returned.
But no amount of self centered ranting or pity party will change the basic facts: For most of these things, nothing I do matters. I cannot fix any of it. For Covid, one of the ones I can do something about, the advice stands: Wait.
How much longer? Who knows. It’s all I can do. The human race is doomed in the long run regardless, perhaps in my lifetime, perhaps many generations from now. Again, who knows? But, with my improved state of mind today, a phrase from a great philosophical work occurs: “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”
TLDR: I am frustrated and often feel like I am so damn alone in a sea of people doing the exact opposite of helping, yeah, I feel like the main character in the opening scenes in a movie explaining how the apocalypse began too. It’s getting old, sorry.
Also, congratulations Elaine. Stairs are better for the environment. ;D
@Elaine: Hooray! I’m so happy to have mine as well. Although I live in a one-floor house, so I haven’t tested it regarding stairs (There are 2 tiny steps up which don’t count). But I’m able to walk to the bathroom and back to the living room, or take a shower without huffing and puffing, so that’s good. Seriously, it was that bad.
My professionally-done Covid test came back negative.
All of which is important to me and the Mr. and nobody else… because I’m not the main character, paranoid, or (not that) narcissistic.
@Surplus: You’re wondering why this may not be like the Spanish flu. What I find to be not terribly useful about your approach is the implied idea that if we all just did what health authorities did that it would obviously, automatically end at exactly the time that any particular pandemic would. That’s just circularly presupposing that this one isn’t different from the other ones. The advice given to everyone was the best that we had for an evolving situation. It wasn’t some promise like “Drink your milk and eat your vegetables and you’ll grow big and strong”.
So maybe we can think of some reasons that it’s taking a little longer?
Doing a little research, I found that it’s generally accepted that pandemics take about two to three years to burn out. Starting to count from December 19, 2019, we’re not even at three years yet. The Spanish flu is generally counted as being from February of 1918 to April of 1920. So 2 years, three months, and it actually took until 1921 for the death rate to arrive at prepandemic levels. The Spanish flu came in four waves. We had Omicron and Delta as the major ones, though there’s obviously Alpha and Beta and sub-variants there too. So it seems like we may even have had fewer major successive waves. In other words, this really isn’t going astonishingly longer than Spanish flu. If we’re still seeing the general mortality rate stay high into 2013, then it would be extraordinary.
Coronavirus seems to be more transmissible and so better at finding pockets and evolving variants. You’re implicitly thinking about it like Spanish flu, but maybe it might also be somewhat analogous to AIDS (with long-haul symptoms for many taking the place of lifelong infection): Something that had a nasty beginning and then has been entrenched as a long-term problem.
But what really strikes me is that this isn’t 1920. There was hesitancy against medical advice and there were conspiracy theories and what not with the Spanish flu, but it doesn’t seem like one of the two major political parties of the imperial center of the planet had made those things central to their present identity. When there’s as much willing mismanagement as we’ve seen for an especially transmissible virus in a world where we are far more integrated than we ever were and have much more traffic than we did in 1920, it stands to reason that maybe the behavior of this pandemic will be somewhat different.
@.45:
I hear you. Thereās so much screwed up right now that takes community, national, or global action to make any headway, and individual actions seem so insignificant in the face of it all.
I feel that, a lot.
It forking sucks.
Keep hanging in there. Do what you can to survive, to help those you can, and all. It sounds silly, but Iāve been leaning stupidly hard on the sea-star boy story, with the āyeah, I canāt save every starfish, but I made a difference to that oneā because if I think too much on everything I canāt fix, my brain weasels go feral.
@.45:
Avengers: Age of Ultron is a “great philosophical work”? š
@Fred B-C:
If anything that should make it shorter and steeper, as it should sweep the whole world in a much shorter time and then burn itself out.
@various:
I guess what’s getting to me here is that, although I’ve spent my whole life being inexplicably held to a very high standard for other people’s behavior, this is the first time the penalties I might face for some other idiot’s screwup have included death and being maimed for life … well, the first time with a realistically significant probability, rather than just a tiny chance of a freak event like being mowed down by a drunk driver jumping the curb or something. It’s certainly the first time the potential penalties have included being made to be the unwitting instrument of someone else’s death.
Besides,
Hello.
Today is the first turn of presidential elections here.
That is also the first time there are two big far right parties with more than 10% in surveys (usually, there is only one). Which sadly means there are more than 1/4 of my fellow citizens are racist bigots. That does not bode well…
Have a nice day.
@ occasional reader
I really hope the hard right votes cancel each other out so neither candidate succeeds, but yes it sucks that there are so many racist bigots it seems everywhere.
@ Surplus, et al
ALL pandemic predicions were always tentative, anyone who said “two years and we’re done” with no qualifications was talking shit, we can’t be sure that this pandemic will follow the pattern of any other pandemic. Historically we have had a pandemic around every hundred years or less, which means the only other pandemic in scientific times was the 1918 and while there are records of other pandemics they are not necessarily as accurate as is needed to enable accurate predictions about the course of this pandemic. There are all sorts of reasons for this, not the least being that they are of different diseases and different diseases behave differently. If we look back to the Bubonic Plague years there were successive waves over centuries, and it killed enough people to introduce social changes across Europe. As far as COVID is concerned we could be nearing the end of the pandemic, but we really don’t know at this point. This is deeply frustrating I know, but I think it’s better to know that we can’t predict what is going to happen with certainty, than to be continually disappointed when the predictions of the overconfident do not come true.
I was about to say that this guy is one of the most disturbing I’ve seen, and then I remembered how many people on here idolize mass murder. This guy only hints at wanting to be a serial killer. At least, he didn’t say it outright. #jaded
I suppose I don’t know what any of this babble means. It is not based in reality. (Side note: most of the happily married men that I have met, even the very conservative ones, waste no time “disciplining and rejecting” their wives. In fact, the wives are very much in charge).
For those who are interested, this babble isn’t even really Biblical There are religious prohibitions against women preachers in the Bible, of course (Paul’s sharp prohibition being the most famous), but the patriarchal phenomenon is not referring to ritual or liturgy. The Bible has many tales of women leaders, prophetesses etc. (Deborah, Huldah, Miriam, etc). Like many radical men, the patriarchal phenomenon ignores Proverbs 31. The Proverbs 31 woman is presented by King Solomon to be a strong and competent woman who buys real estate and whose husband mostly sits around “in the gates with the elders” while she does everything. Well, now talk about a sweet deal for that Biblical guy, finding a strong matriarchal woman! And in the Bible, too!
Congratulations to @Elaine for getting better after Covid. That just sucks.
@epitome of incomprehensibility. I’ve read the Angel in the House. A woeful and tiresome bit of Victorian literature, turgid and depressing, very painful to read. I read it actually to my sister yesterday (she considers herself a very proud feminist) and she would have laughed if it wasn’t so awful.
@Malintzin: While the reality of female heroes in the Bible is true, I think you may be understating the Bible’s sexism.
@Surplus:
That’d be true if it couldn’t evolve variants. Spreading faster into areas where it can be in a pocket can cause it to have yet more chances to vary. And since people can get reinfected by new variants (though less often and usually less severely), that can mean they can spread it again. And all my other analysis would still apply.
And the chance that you get killed by someone else on the road or by some politician screwing up was also always decently high. Like, nuclear war is still nowhere near impossible. I agree, it sucks especially hard here because people being this is causing the risks to be extremely pronounced and persistent, and it would be so easy for them to do the things that would reduce the threat… but then again, I doubt you are perfect yourself. You seem like you’re much more likely to be vigilant than many people, but we all will slip up sometimes. Still, I have to sympathize, because I do feel the same way. Most people here probably get that.
And… no, Ultron and Vision were almost certainly not pointing to Tiamut. Not just because it’s unlikely that they had worked out the specific implementation of the Celestials on MCU Earth yet, but also because Ultron and Vision were disagreeing exactly on the importance of permanence. Vision saw beauty in mankind despite its flaws, Ultron didn’t. It’s… kind of the… core philosophical disagreement of the movie. And, yeah, I really liked that interaction.
I’m less worried about COVID than I was before, mainly because the current variants seem to be causing less severe disease.
(That might not reassure anyone who’s still suffering its effects, of course. @Elaine, I’m glad the inhaler is working.)
I’m more scared than before of the effects of war and global warming, though, so I guess it balances out.
@Malintzin – It also brought out some snarkiness in Virginia Woolf, who wrote that she killed the imaginary character š (in A Room of One’s Own, if I remember right)
…Also, not that anyone cares, but to correct a mistake I made earlier: my parents’ puppy is three months old, not four. Apparently I can’t count.
@epitome
Not so much worried about war – this is the first one in nigh on 40 years that I’ve not had to keep an eye on in case I got sent out to be shot at. It’s a weird feeling. š
Climate change though, that worries me a lot, especially since the UN has finally grabbed it’s courage in both hands and admitted what we knew almost for certain three years ago: we’ve missed the chance to confine it to a 1.5C rise.
I feel like the conversation has taken some strange turns…
@ contrapangloss
Thank you. I am frustrated, but that was, as I said, something of a meltdown. Believe it or not, I feel I am actually doing better in some regards than I ever have been in life, simply because I am becoming more open about my various issues. Bottling things up like Luisa from Encanto is not healthy. I’m a work in progress.
@ Surplus to Requirements
I suppose I should put a disclaimer on my posts saying “May contain sarcasm”, but ultimately, you can find philosophy and inspiration wherever you want.
(For example, in Frozen, Elza’s attitude and song about being herself and free is admirable, but the rest of the movie is about how hiding from the world out of fear of hurting people and being hurt is wrong. Life is more about friends, family, and warm hugs…. yes, I have younger siblings, how did you know?)
And I never even thought about the Eternals and Tiamut when I happened to see the last part of Age of Ultron recently. Now I kind of want to rewatch the whole series thinking about that, even if Fred B-C is correct and there was no connection.
@ epitome of incomprehensibility
and Threp
I personally do not think climate change will end the human species, at least in the near future, but there is the potential to disrupt society to the point where we will all be living as best we can in conditions little better than mud huts with next to no modern medicine, technology, etc, etc, always scrambling to get away from the latest wildfire or storm. The number of people dying would be on a scale we haven’t seen outside of the starvation of Russians around the 1940s for example (I know there are many examples, but not too many in my lifetime in the US), and many others would be living in abject misery and pain.
@.45: Eternals does sort of make some of the meta-narrative of the MCU a little more sensible. The increase in the density of crises and conflicts can be framed in terms of the Celestials being almost done with their harvesting project. Having recently rewatched AoO, I think the clarity of the Thanos association is so substantial (e.g. Ultron could possibly have fought Thanos, but Ultron really would have had very little to do against Tiamut popping out from inside the planet, so Tony’s drive to make Ultron retroactively makes a lot more sense given Thanos but not really as a counter to the Celestials).
Thinking about it, I wonder if Guardians 2 makes a lot of sense in the light of Eternals. Ego does have a divine level of self-obsession, and Ego is a living planet, but… the Celestials pretty clearly consume the planet to get a humanoid form instead of looking like a planet, and Ego’s goals are so overtly against the Celestials (indeed undermining the mainline Celestials’ plans) that it makes a lot less sense.