Someone should write a provocative article connecting the decline in sperm and the Conservative party with the feminisation of everything. I'd read it.
It's funny, as an old lefty, to feel disgruntled with my own side's drift into permormative identity issues while having the reassurance that the Tories no longer stand for anything at all. But it does mean that my lot will have no one serious to keep them honest. Never a healthy situation. (Unless you're an emergent 'populist' party, which I'll be shocked not to see become a thing).
Re: something in the water—some of the intro-level environmental science textbooks were already covering environmental estrogens fifteen if not twenty years ago. I have been surprised how little attention it seems to receive in the larger world, but always figured that’s because it’s too depressing a subject and too difficult to do anything about. If it’s considered a fringe right-wing idea, that figures, because that’s the media cycle with many legit problems these days: fringy types talk about a real problem in a careless way (“they’re gaying the frogs!”), and the normies on the other side point and laugh and use it as an excuse to ignore something that they don’t want to deal with anyway.
Ah. Well, there you go—SSC already made the point much better than I could. I only skimmed their post, so, apologies if they already said this too…but I think the other part of the issue with endocrine disrupters in particular is that it’s pretty much a lost cause already. We’re not going to make the collective economic and social changes necessary to stop these types of chemicals from getting into the water—it just ain’t gonna happen—so any excuse to brush it off is eagerly taken.
I’m hardly an expert, and I hope someone comes along to tell me I’m full of shit on this, but my understanding is that the amount of actual chemicals that get removed during the sewage treatment process is way smaller than you might think. Solids get removed, and maybe some basic chemical treatment is performed, but all kinds of things that are dissolved in the water get through just fine. And while it might be technically possible to remove at least some of those chemicals, doing it at the scale of municipal sewage treatment would be really expensive.
As regards the current fuss ('the treatment of trifling matters as important, abundance of petty detail - OED), the Monarchy has recovered handsomely from much worse. 30 January 1649 was a particularly difficult day but within barely ten years the people had tired of the alternative.
If there were literally something in the water I wonder how this would affect women. Would they become more or less feminine? You would imagine the former yet Audrey Hepburn clones are rare round our way.
I often watch the BBC news and think, 'Why do so many of the blokes nowadays sound so gay?' Not only the pitch of their voice but also the wheedling tones. And even the way things are reported. This evening the BBC journalist started his report on a shooting outside a church in London after a funeral with, 'A moment of love was transformed by a moment of hate', all said in dulcet tones. Who writes this guff, Barbara Cartland?
I think that is timeless. Young men are taught to speak by young women so they do sound feminine to older men - Why linguists look for rural batchelors
For the last several decades, women have been increasingly glorified in society, and young men have been learning that to be valued, one must abandon any traits seen as masculine (b/c they're toxic, of course) and adopt traits more common to the female half of the species. Traditionally male forms of conflict have given way to the softer violence of social shunning, character assassination, and on-line lynch mobs.
In addition to the social aspects are the various endocrine disrupters and xenoestrogens in our environment that hamper male development.
This feminization reaches full flower when men finally crack and need to believe that they are in fact women, despite lacking every biological marker or being female.
What you say sounds very probable. Still, if it is true I can't help but apportion some share of the blame to men for letting it happen, just as I blame us for allowing our societies to be overrun by immigrants. There is also the complication of the increased number of women who claim to be men. If men are now considered a historical deadend, why would they do that?
"Still, if it is true I can't help but apportion some share of the blame to men for letting it happen"
I would say you're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, one of men's greatest weakness is wanting to please women, and will go to any ridiculous lengths to do so.
And yet we are sometimes told that many women find The New Man a bit annoying and a sexual turn-off. I would like to know precisely who, rather than merely claiming it's the amorphous 'society', is exerting this pressure on us.
I ask the same question when women claim there is societal pressure for them to be thin. Who is putting pressure on you? No man of my acquaintance wants a woman to be unhealthily thin. Health is, after all, a prerequisite of beauty.
Tories: A "takeover" (even if staged) by the anti-Brexit wing (like Blair and the trade unions) could be the key to success. All the mistakes of the past are blamed on "outmoded ideas. If Labour fumes at the attempt to steal Blair-ism, let them try.
"([Andrew] Tate has been neatly described as a male-to-male transsexual)."
That made me laugh out loud, although it just occurred to me that "transsexual" is like a slur now, isn't it? Could Mr. Leslie be arrested for hate speech?
Ian Leslie's piece is dead-on. They're all in it together in these fusses on social media and even on broadcast media. "He/She that dies with the most narcissistic supply wins." The Sussexes could, in theory, go away with their wealth and be happy in private, but people like Greta Thunberg and Andrew Tate would almost literally cease to exist if they weren't trending on Twitspace.
And George Conway is the poster boy for American proles' rejection of elites: he has all the credentials, and he's a dimwitted grifter dependent, for his IV drip of attention, on the Cryptkeeper and her former association with Donald Trump.
Ultimately, I blame the audience, including myself for typing this, because it shows I'm paying attention, too.
You might not get arrested (even in England) but I don't think it would get past editors at any paper, even conservatives ones (I may be wrong). This is yet another reason substack is thriving!
Re Gay Frogs. There is probably an issue with hormonal contraceptives -messing with behaviour. Iirc the pill majes you think your body are in the very early stages of pregnancy- in the way an IUD does not. Beyond that I wonder if we are selecting for less testerorone
Since the Tories are not really conservative I'm not sure that it matters whether they implode or not. Their only use right now, admittedly quite important, is keeping Labour out of power. Of course, a new political party (Reform? SDP?) could take over the conservative mantle but I don't see why all the factors that made the Tories cower and pushed them away from real conservatism wouldn't affect a new conservative party in the same way.
Someone should write a provocative article connecting the decline in sperm and the Conservative party with the feminisation of everything. I'd read it.
It's funny, as an old lefty, to feel disgruntled with my own side's drift into permormative identity issues while having the reassurance that the Tories no longer stand for anything at all. But it does mean that my lot will have no one serious to keep them honest. Never a healthy situation. (Unless you're an emergent 'populist' party, which I'll be shocked not to see become a thing).
That's the problem with Democrats in the US; they have to supply their own loyal opposition from within the party.
Re: something in the water—some of the intro-level environmental science textbooks were already covering environmental estrogens fifteen if not twenty years ago. I have been surprised how little attention it seems to receive in the larger world, but always figured that’s because it’s too depressing a subject and too difficult to do anything about. If it’s considered a fringe right-wing idea, that figures, because that’s the media cycle with many legit problems these days: fringy types talk about a real problem in a careless way (“they’re gaying the frogs!”), and the normies on the other side point and laugh and use it as an excuse to ignore something that they don’t want to deal with anyway.
I think the respectability cascade explains a lot on that front:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascades/
Ah. Well, there you go—SSC already made the point much better than I could. I only skimmed their post, so, apologies if they already said this too…but I think the other part of the issue with endocrine disrupters in particular is that it’s pretty much a lost cause already. We’re not going to make the collective economic and social changes necessary to stop these types of chemicals from getting into the water—it just ain’t gonna happen—so any excuse to brush it off is eagerly taken.
well that's depressing
Just warming you up for Blue Monday.
lol
Can't they be filtered out? All sorts of nasty chemicals get filtered from sewage, why are these so different?
I’m hardly an expert, and I hope someone comes along to tell me I’m full of shit on this, but my understanding is that the amount of actual chemicals that get removed during the sewage treatment process is way smaller than you might think. Solids get removed, and maybe some basic chemical treatment is performed, but all kinds of things that are dissolved in the water get through just fine. And while it might be technically possible to remove at least some of those chemicals, doing it at the scale of municipal sewage treatment would be really expensive.
You are correct. The wastewater treatment process does not remove synthetic hormones or a lot of other medical residue.
I have never though of it as a Rightist concern. If anything vaguely Leftist stuff like GMO.
As regards the current fuss ('the treatment of trifling matters as important, abundance of petty detail - OED), the Monarchy has recovered handsomely from much worse. 30 January 1649 was a particularly difficult day but within barely ten years the people had tired of the alternative.
Maybe in opposition the Tories can at least nominally oppose the endless progressive stuff they’ve done nothing about while in power.
If there were literally something in the water I wonder how this would affect women. Would they become more or less feminine? You would imagine the former yet Audrey Hepburn clones are rare round our way.
I often watch the BBC news and think, 'Why do so many of the blokes nowadays sound so gay?' Not only the pitch of their voice but also the wheedling tones. And even the way things are reported. This evening the BBC journalist started his report on a shooting outside a church in London after a funeral with, 'A moment of love was transformed by a moment of hate', all said in dulcet tones. Who writes this guff, Barbara Cartland?
I think that is timeless. Young men are taught to speak by young women so they do sound feminine to older men - Why linguists look for rural batchelors
The fact that boys are taught to speak by their mums since time immemorial doesn't explain why this particular generation is so effeminate.
Do linguists look for rural bachelors? To do what exactly? Or is it a euphemism for something kinky?
For the last several decades, women have been increasingly glorified in society, and young men have been learning that to be valued, one must abandon any traits seen as masculine (b/c they're toxic, of course) and adopt traits more common to the female half of the species. Traditionally male forms of conflict have given way to the softer violence of social shunning, character assassination, and on-line lynch mobs.
In addition to the social aspects are the various endocrine disrupters and xenoestrogens in our environment that hamper male development.
This feminization reaches full flower when men finally crack and need to believe that they are in fact women, despite lacking every biological marker or being female.
What you say sounds very probable. Still, if it is true I can't help but apportion some share of the blame to men for letting it happen, just as I blame us for allowing our societies to be overrun by immigrants. There is also the complication of the increased number of women who claim to be men. If men are now considered a historical deadend, why would they do that?
"Still, if it is true I can't help but apportion some share of the blame to men for letting it happen"
I would say you're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, one of men's greatest weakness is wanting to please women, and will go to any ridiculous lengths to do so.
"(I think she was being naive rather than credulous)"
Naive and credulous mean the same thing.
We in American have assigned Blue Monday, the third Monday in January, as the Martin Luther King Bank Holiday. Make of that what you will.
And yet we are sometimes told that many women find The New Man a bit annoying and a sexual turn-off. I would like to know precisely who, rather than merely claiming it's the amorphous 'society', is exerting this pressure on us.
I ask the same question when women claim there is societal pressure for them to be thin. Who is putting pressure on you? No man of my acquaintance wants a woman to be unhealthily thin. Health is, after all, a prerequisite of beauty.
Tories: A "takeover" (even if staged) by the anti-Brexit wing (like Blair and the trade unions) could be the key to success. All the mistakes of the past are blamed on "outmoded ideas. If Labour fumes at the attempt to steal Blair-ism, let them try.
"([Andrew] Tate has been neatly described as a male-to-male transsexual)."
That made me laugh out loud, although it just occurred to me that "transsexual" is like a slur now, isn't it? Could Mr. Leslie be arrested for hate speech?
Ian Leslie's piece is dead-on. They're all in it together in these fusses on social media and even on broadcast media. "He/She that dies with the most narcissistic supply wins." The Sussexes could, in theory, go away with their wealth and be happy in private, but people like Greta Thunberg and Andrew Tate would almost literally cease to exist if they weren't trending on Twitspace.
And George Conway is the poster boy for American proles' rejection of elites: he has all the credentials, and he's a dimwitted grifter dependent, for his IV drip of attention, on the Cryptkeeper and her former association with Donald Trump.
Ultimately, I blame the audience, including myself for typing this, because it shows I'm paying attention, too.
You might not get arrested (even in England) but I don't think it would get past editors at any paper, even conservatives ones (I may be wrong). This is yet another reason substack is thriving!
Good point.
Re Harry. While I get it, he is personally awful.
I did notice
https://twitter.com/Aug354430/status/1613922888335372290?t=Ge_CuRzQHHrx5XFpXMiYog&s=19
Forget the stuff about the dog Latin. Focus on the details about Pam- Pam is the matron? Yep I get that it is a thankless job
Yup I get Harry holds petulant grudges
But remember what I was saying about some women teachers seeming to hate boys.
This is an example
I did like the Robert Mitchum line
Re Gay Frogs. There is probably an issue with hormonal contraceptives -messing with behaviour. Iirc the pill majes you think your body are in the very early stages of pregnancy- in the way an IUD does not. Beyond that I wonder if we are selecting for less testerorone
I don't know how good I am predicting things. There is certainly a gap in the market for something else, certainly.
Since the Tories are not really conservative I'm not sure that it matters whether they implode or not. Their only use right now, admittedly quite important, is keeping Labour out of power. Of course, a new political party (Reform? SDP?) could take over the conservative mantle but I don't see why all the factors that made the Tories cower and pushed them away from real conservatism wouldn't affect a new conservative party in the same way.