Schadrach

Specifically to have that conversation - there is no connection whatsoever between "earned their money" and "has views I agree with" or even "has non-harmful views." At least Notch doesn't do worse than occasionally tweet what he thinks.

You grossly underestimate just how shitty people can be. Which is wild given what's going on in gestures wildly.

I mean there is a difference between "earned their money rather than being born into it" and "has all the correct politics".

I have witnessed not one single rich person earn fucking shit!

I mean there are a handful that created some kind of creative work that became wildly popular and their wealth is ultimately derived primarily from that creation that you could argue earned it. Like Notch or JK Rowling.

I take your point, but look at the way power is arranged in our society from the makeup of the ownership class to the way unpaid labor usually falls to women.

Try not limiting your look to the very top. Because much like the top, the bottom is heavily weighted towards men.

I do like the framing, but I see it as evidence of the patriarchy and how it damages men too and I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to make.

"The Patriarchy hurts men too" is an apologetic. The religious equivalent is "God works in mysterious ways." The whole and entire point is so that when reality does not align with what is predicted by the model (whether that model is Patriarchy or an all knowing, all powerful, all good monotheistic God) to dismiss reality without thinking about it further. The whole point is to make Patriarchy unfalsifiable, which is not a positive thing for any model you expect to be able to predict anything because it can explain literally anything a posteriori and so has no predictive power. The whole point here is that malagency makes predictions that align with reality more consistently than Patriarchy.

Look at say criminal justice. Under a model based on Marxist class conflict, you would expect criminal justice to be wielded primary against the oppressed class while the oppressor class is given a lighter touch if at all. This neatly aligns with what we see with economic class (which is what Marxist class conflict is meant for) and also for race (because race in the US in a lot of ways is tied to and behaves like economic class), so for sex you'd expect to continue to see the same, right? Except you don't. By most measures you might use to demonstrate how criminal justice racially oppresses black folk and is easier on white folk if you break it down by sex instead of race the numbers look an awful lot like the criminal justice system oppresses men and is easier on women.

Which is what you would expect under malagency - men being perceived as higher agency for good or for ill means men are seen as more responsible for their actions and thus effectively more responsible for their crimes. I was actually surprised that the recent black child slavery case out of WV (practically in my backyard) had the woman get a longer sentence than her husband, though I have yet to find an article that details who was charged with what (beyond "several charges" and which charges were found guilty (beyond "most of them").

Women have only recently, within my mother’s lifetime, been able to get their own credit lines separately from their husband.

The fallout of coverture (which I am almost certainly spelling wrong), wherein a woman's assets and debts (and responsibility for some crimes) belonged to her father or later husband. A single woman no longer under her father could legally hold debts, property, etc (the term used was femme sole), but if she married those things would then be under her husband. The thing is, it's harder to collect on debts the debtor never actually agreed to, so most (but not all) lenders would refuse credit lines to women without a male cosign, because of the additional difficulty in pursuing payment if things went south. This neatly falls under the same umbrella - women were often refused credit lines without a male cosign because they were (first legally and then later due to social inertia seen as) less responsible for their debts, while men were responsible for both their debts (and until coverture ended) and those of their daughters and spouse.

They recently lost their hard-won reproductive freedoms.

Interestingly, being pro-life or pro-choice is not a strongly gendered phenomenon (according to polling from 2024, about 45% of men are pro-choice vs about 60% of women). The abortion issue isn't men oppressing women, it's (mostly religious) conservatives who see abortion as killing babies versus liberals and progressives who see a fetus as an essentially meaningless clump of cells.

They are far more likely to be killed by their long-term partners than are men.

...which is more about efficacy of violence than propensity for it. There have been several studies going back my entire life that suggest that women engage in violence in a relationship as often or more often than men, the difference is largely about size and strength.

It seems in my mind incongruous to suggest that there was not a patriarchy in Roman times, when a paterfamilias could legally kill anyone in his family (including his wife), or during the middle ages or Renaissance when women were kept from political or religious offices (with minimal exceptions),

It seems in my mind incongruous to argue that nearly all cultures (not quite all, as you might point to say the Hopi or the Mosuo (sp?) or a few other exceptions) worldwide for all of history are in any way a single, coherent system of any kind.

Trump behaves more or less as you'd expect if you model him as a sock puppet with Elon Musk and Putin taking turns as the hand up his ass.

A thing assigned to you that's in your hand or your head that's needed to engage in commerce? That's...umm...I can see where they could get that idea, especially with the rise of online sales.

It’s not. In the western world this is a myth based on extremely outdated gender and family stereotypes. Some women prefer to have men pay, some prefer to pay themselves, some don’t really care. It’s not a hard rule you can use as an excuse to give up.

Generally, not absolutely at all times. The woman I eventually married settled into a plan of taking turns as to who pays for dates (she literally insisted to pay for the second date since I paid for the first, and it grew into a pattern from there). From the mid 90s to the first Trump admin (the period of time in which I was dating girls/women) she was one of only 3 who suggested or encouraged splitting the costs in some fashion.

This is just straight up incel cope. You cannot put all women in a box like that and then wonder why you are struggling to meet anyone.

Who put all women in a box? It's a tendency, a trend, not an absolute descriptor of all individuals. At the same time if you believe wealth/status indicators do not play a significant role in how attractive women perceive men to be, or at least no more so than the reverse you're going to be very disappointed in the ladies. There is research out there to that effect, specifically that wealth indicators correlate positively with attractiveness for both men and women, but that the effect is much stronger in women considering men than the other way around.

Any random 9-digit number can be a valid SSN.

Not true - there are whole ranges that specifically aren't in use (mostly specific values for the first three digits that are intentionally not used). Outside those ranges though, yeah, basically any 9 digit number. Add one to the last digit of your SSN and if you were born before 2014 you likely get someone born in the same hospital on the same day.

I mean if we go that route, then the following letters are also hate symbols. m,n,o,S,X and Z if paired with the number 13. Given the number of hate numbers listed by the ADL I'm surprised that the list isn't longer but most of them are either too low or too high to align to an ASCII value for a letter.

I'd argue patriarchy is a bad model for the social dynamics regarding sex. It's just another rebranding of Marxist class conflict onto something other than economic class, and as a consequence it works about as well as that something actually resembles (or alternately is a proxy for) economic class. This means it works OK for race in the US (except for Asians, who get to be functionally white in some cases) but it it's a bad fit for sex.

It's why there are so many apologetics around patriarchy for all the myriad cases where reality just doesn't seem to align with what you would expect based on it a priori. "The patriarchy hurts men too" is probably the most common, though you'd be hard pressed to argue "Capitalism hurts billionaires too" or "white supremacy hurts whites too" in the same kind of fashion. Because the moment you stop looking at the fraction of a percent of the top performers the idea that society was created by and for men to benefit men above women first and foremost just doesn't align with observation.

What seems to be a more fitting model to me is malagency, the idea that agency is inappropriately assigned based on the sex of the party in question. Specifically that in general women are assumed to have less agency than they otherwise might while men are assumed to have more agency than they otherwise might. This fits neatly with lots of observations - ideas presented by a man being given extra credit or consideration than the same coming from a woman (because he's seen as more responsible for his ideas than a woman might be), the very highest tiers of things having over-representation by men but also when men are also over-represented at the bottom (for example, rough sleeping homeless) because they are seen as more responsible for their own successes and failures as well, or why the criminal justice system treats men much worse than women (women are seen as less responsible for their transgressions). Etc, etc.

instead of blaming all their problems and all the world’s problems on women and feminists

Sometimes it is their fault. Protests against equal custody laws, for example. Kentucky was the first state to pass one that required the judge in contested custody cases to start from the position that equal custody is best for the child unless there is a reason it might not be. The closest other states had gotten before that were laws that required judges "consider" equal custody as a possibility, as opposed to having to work from it as a starting point.

Ever seen the Big Red angry feminist meme? She's a real person from Toronto and the meme started because she was protesting a talk on suicide in men at the University of Toronto by shouting a Jezebel article at the crowd, and if anyone tried to engage with her yelling "shut up fuckface!" or similar at them. A few different phrasings but she was fond of "fuckface" as an insult in particular. If you check out The Red Pill documentary (it's creator did a Kickstarter to fund finishing it) one of the interviews is of Big Red herself.

The organization behind that talk on suicide in men later went on to found what at the time (and possibly still is though I haven't checked) the only shelter for male victims of abuse in Canada.

Not the first such shelter, as that was Men's Alternative Safe Housing which was founded by Earl Silverman and had to be run entirely on his own resources and private donations because he couldn't get government funding for it because it was a men's shelter and not a women's shelter. Eventually he couldn't afford to keep it going, and when he had to shut it down hung himself in the garage of his now-defunct shelter the day after he sold it.