Sam Harris

[MotherEarthisaTerf]

Wow! Sam Harris’ latest podcast called The Reckoning.

Right out of the gate, only a few minutes in he is blaming the Democrat defeat at the doors of those who swallowed the TRA movement and pushed it repeatedly.

I was going to quote it but he’s talking about it for so long (women’s sports, social conditioning etc)

it’s worth a listen. He’s considered to be neutral, intelligent, left leaning and very well respected

www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/391-the-reckoning

I think that's a real overstatement.

The Christian conservatives that are very into stuff like women in the hole are a very small, weird group. That's generally sects like the Duggars belonged to. They aren't generally well regarded by Christian conservatives.

The majority have their share of kids who have their own personalities and they educate their daughters and don't think everyone necessarily has to marry. Some of the most educated women I've ever met are Christian conservative women.

The reason most of them are anti-abortion is nothing to do with an anti-equality perspective, it comes out of a very strong sense of equality of all human life, under all conditions. That might not be a belief shared by most secular people but it's not some kind of arbitrary power play.

Yes. The same has happened in Canada and I think it is actually incredibly destabilizing to the society.

It's a direct blow, in a Westminster system, to the primacy of Parliament. (Interestingly in Canada this happened under Pierre Trudeau, who may have been an exciting rock star intellectual PM, but seemed to have an over-regard for the American Constitution and their systems generally.)

The Americans of course don't have that principle, but the SC justices chose to take that approach. As I understand it, hat's basically the difference between conservative judged like Thomas and liberal ones like RBG. It's not their personal politics as such. It's that the former group sees their role as limited to interpreting and making clear the law and constitution within the context it was intended, while the latter sees it as using the law as a tool to push social progress. In An American context where the judiciary is one leg of their three legged stool that is maybe a more defensible proposition, but I thing it's going to be destabilizing.

And to me the big warning with that approach is, be careful what you wish for, if you create a tool like that you aren't the only one who will pick it up.

I meant "women on the whole" in that post, not "women in in the hole". I don't think even the most tradwife types put women in holes as a general thing,

I was actually thinking: is there one of those weird passages in Leviticus that says 'husbands put your wives in holes?' 🤣

I follow a young trad wife on insta.

Because she fascinates me; she dresses like an extra from Little House on the Prairie and pickles everything.

But the abuse she gets is insane.

She takes it all in her stride. She reposts some of the really personal nasty insane stuff and she does lots of videos directly addressing the criticism of her lifestyle from the comments.

But there are no outcries for the abuse and intolerance towards the lifestyles of trad wives is there?

Conservatives accept many people view their choices as weird and that people have no qualms about telling them so.
They accept this as long as they continue to have the right to live how they want

They are not the ones to trying to make everyone celebrate their lifestyle.

It's the left who seem to believe that the right to live how you want isn't enough. They need everyone to agree on what is best and celebrate it.

The answer to that has to be. No.
We won't go along with your authoritarian demands for conformity. Instead you will tolerate the discomfort of differing opinion just like we have to.

If it helps in days past when divorces were settled by trial by combat (a fight to the death) the husbands would be in a hole (because Mediaeval peeps understood about physical sex differences). It makes no fault divorce look extremely boring by comparison.

Thats completely innexcusable. i will say though - that "LGBT" people who post about their lifestyles on instagram etc will get a barrage of abuse. As will people who post themselves on Twitter. Some of it will be mockery, or people raising genuine issues with the things they say. Others will just be downright abusive. And it all gets mixed up together in a big mess - that probably does lead some "LGBT" people to believe the world hates them/conservatives hate them/ GC people want them dead. Its really unhealthy. And of course, while there will be people just posting about their lives and getting horrible abuse there will also be people (like the extremely creepy Jeffry Marsh) who actively encourage abusive messages so that he can then talk to the camera about how persecuted he is (and also how persecuted trans children are and they can trust only him. Bleurgh). See also the mums of trans kids who will make a big deal about reading the messages people send to their kids and asking how their children feel about it. Vile. Even people who are genuinely just posting about their lives will be incentivised by the algorithms to make a big thing about hostility towards them - because "I react to my critics" and crying response videos get lots of views. Even people with 100% the best of intentions can very easily get sucked into that angle, and there are also grifters. And the whole ecosystem feeds itself - Ben Shapiro needs blue haired teenagers with nose rings crying about rhe Republicans so he can make sarcastic response videos. And left winger youtubers need trad-wives they can make sceptical videos about. And the trad-wives that want to make a living from producing content need the left wingers to make videos about them to boost their profile and so they can make their own response videos.
I put LGBT in quotes by the way because it covers your average gay guy just posting about their life and getting trolls telling them they will go to hell. And the Jeffrey Marshes of this world.
I am in two minds about those lifestyle blogs/videos. It can be genuinely interesting finding out about other people's ways of life. Especially when they are different to my own or my own expectations. But I think the way social media works and is monetised is it is so easy to end up looking like the world is split into two groups one hated and unfairly attacked by the other. But the world isn't like that at all.

Wow. I’m about to divorce husband number three. I doubt I’d have the energy to bother if I had to beat him to death, even with the hole factored in.

True.

I guess the lesson is: put your life out there and you are going to get shit. Someone will hate they way you live and think you need to know it.

Luckily in RL people at leat have the common courtesy to suppress their opinion about your life!

😂

Yes, but I also think most people in real life (left and right, trad and non-conventional) don't care that much. So its not even that they are politely holding their criticism back. We are all just less interesting to strangers than we believe ourselves to be. And that's a good thing. It was the most freeing thing I was told as a self-conscious teenager - the vast majority of people are too busy worrying about their own lives to be thinking about you. But teenagers today are being messaged the opposite via social media and it is wrong.

The first time I heard about trad wives was on a Radio National (Australia) program. The lead in made it all sound so ominous, I kept waiting for the revelations of hideous abuse. The hosts ghasping and tutting about women baking lots of cakes and stuff, I couldn't help but think, this is just progressive curtain twitching.

Yep.

Progressive curtain twitching 🤣🤣

She's made 2 pots of soup and knitted a quilt today.
It's disgusting!

MalagaNights, re teaching a particular value system to children, there are certain values that should be promoted. If religious schools teach that homosexuality is wrong & gay people should remain celibate, that's going to mess up the gay children who grow up being taught that. Do you view that as acceptable collateral damage?
People, including on here, often say that Muslim immigrants need to integrate & the children need to be taught British values, & shouldn't be segregated in Muslim only schools. If they heard about gay Muslim children growing up self-hating bc of what their school taught, they'd probably cite it as another reason for Islamic schools not to be allowed, or at least moderated. I would agree, but also think the same should go for Christian schools who teach that kind of thing.
I disagree that conservatives criticise others' lifestyles less than Liberals do. There's obvs a big movement in US for women to be more restricted- what's Project 2025 if not that? A lot of tradwife proponents will probs support that.

Isn't that pretty much the same as being a SAHM who likes cooking etc?

The tradwives I have issues with are the kind who bash feminism, say stuff like 'my husband tells me who to vote for, I don't worry about politics', 'a wife should obey her husband', 'women who want a career are selfish' and similar. Plus promoting dangerous stuff like raw milk & no vaccines. However, maybe that's just an annoying TikTok subset who give them all a bad name unfairly. The Ballerina Farm lady seems fine, for one

Presumably these radio ones weren't like that?

'The lifestyle' - why the 1970s vocabulary? Having a gay relationship is not a 'lifestyle' any more than having a straight relationship is.

Unless you'd use this term for having straight relationships too, in which case I apologise.

I read a lot of right wing material of all kinds of branches : from evangelical Christian to libertarian to neoconservative to communitarian to alt-right.

It is completely inaccurate to say that right wingers don't view left wing life choices as a threat. Many of all kinds certainly do, and the 4B movement is certainly one of them.

Moreover, do you not think surrendered wives are worrying? I've read about that idea. That Laura lady who started it encourages women to give up all financial control to husband, isn't that worrying? I listened to several episodes of her podcast, and in one, she encouraged woman to return to a violent husband

The 'stop giving your opinion' method she encourages is a bit much, too.

I wouldn't call it a threat exactly, not to society at large, certainly, but it's definitely potentially v negative for women who do it if it enables abuse.

And even if it doesn't, how is it positive for anyone, male or female, to be so submissive to their partner? I wouldn't condone surrendered husbands or this dynamic in gay relationships, either!

It's perfectly fine to say some lifestyles are negative and harmful, whether it's Only fans, 24/7 BDSM, transgenderism or surrendered wives. How can one be a feminist if one just condones all choices? Choices feminism is nothing.