How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service

My argument is, it's a vastly underpowered system in terms of the filtering options available to users. Those things ought to remain available, but I wish it were easier to tell Youtube my goals for a browsing session and turn off porn mode.

> ‘true’ Einsteins, Edisons, and Teslas wouldn’t be so easily distracted.

... or maybe they didn't have the distractions and that was key?

I wouldn't agree with that argument, though. What does 'true' in that sense even mean? Do we as a society want to weed out the easily distractible or do we want to ensure that more people are able to flourish?

Is a potential 21st century Einstein somehow "less valuable" because his surroundings ensured he could live up to his potential?

You can easily rebut that…no, they would, if you make a library with 90% porn in it they would have a harder time doing research in that library than a normal one.

Feynman loved to go to strip clubs, so it is totally possible to be a genius and a perv.

Time management is key.

True Franklins wouldn’t be so much distracted as fueled by it.

As someone who grew up with the term, the overly-analytical tone describing "thirst trap" is uncomfortable!

You're thirsty if you're horny, typically for a particular person but not always.

You're thirsting over someone if you're horny for someone in particular.

A thirst trap is an act (or video, or Instagram post, etc.) that intends to make others thirst over you. It's like a mating display, but with ulterior motives, if you want to look at it that way.

You forgot to add a bunch of [citation needed]

So you believe women would be better off without access to abortions and contraceptives because men have to be shitty to women if the women choose to have sex? Not every guy feels the need to shame a woman for having a sex drive.

Why would a woman, forced into viewing sex as inherently risky, want to get married to a guy with those views? Wouldn't it be better to be dumped after a few dates instead of being married to someone who doesn't respect you.

In this world are married couple, also forced to only have sex for procreation or have their family size explode to levels where they can't afford their children. Why would men or women want that? Kids survive childhood far more often and most people don't need a bunch of free labor for the fields anymore.

This is also completely ignoring the huge health issues we are seeing now in states banning abortions, with women being forced to bring dead fetuses to term, doctors afraid of running afoul of the law to save a woman's life when there is an issue with the pregnancy, and raped children and women being forced to flee their state or have their rapist's baby.

It's a pretty sick future if we eventually encourage these mass shooters to rape someone on their way to the crime because they know their lineage will live on.

I’m having difficulty believing that you’re saying what I think you’re saying.

Are you really suggesting that the option of contraception and abortion should be removed, to ensure that women are loved, respected, and cherished by men?

And what's the woman's perspective in all this?

Historically, I don't exactly think women were loved, respected or cherished by men, at least not all the time, nor how we think of it in modern terms and I don't think contraception is the cause of it.

Women in many cultures and times were just seen as baby machines and failing to have children often led to intense shame especially if the women failed to produce the right gender. And for those with unwanted pregnancy - suicide was a common option either by failed abortion, or trying to make ends meet in other ways, or just straight suicide I read quite a lot of stories of it. People made things work or just didn't and finished it quickly, they were expected to and I'd say that the concept of love was a lot different then how we think of it now. People did things because they were supposed to (or were forced too), not always because they wanted to. You can look at any time in history and see this, the Bible has a ton of examples of poor women in bad situations (Leah & Rachel, Hagar, Bathsheba, etc). It also even brings up when to abort a child as a way to prove guilt or innocence of sleeping around (Ordeal of the bitter water.) But you find concubine stories, slave stories, multiple wives all over the world, ... Women historical were often treated more like children or objects then treasure. The Bible also shows cases of women in power too (Deborah, Miriam, etc) and the love of them is mixed. I'm just saying you might think it's a 'modern problem' but it's always been a part of history. Conception has always been around too even if not well understood, the rich having the best access.

I do agree that relationships nowadays can be much cheaper though but for particular generations like millennials for example sex in general is at an all time historical low. I'd say in general more people are afraid of relationships then anything due to money, family trauma or many other cases be it America, Europe and Asian countries. It's more stress and fear related then anything I'd say besides the devaluing of children (in cities they are an expense, on a farm an asset). Plus with many families separated because of work, it's harder to rise children with lack of community in many places.

Hi. I'm a feminist and I support women doing whatever they want of their own autonomous will. Including marketing dumb weak men that can't seem to keep their crystal meth addiction out of every corner of their life.

People here talk a whole lot about Chesterton's Fence when it comes to engineering topics and promptly forget it all when switching over to sociopolitical topics.

> But that doesn't mean that conservatism in general is a bad idea.

It's crazy to me that conservatism has become a dirty word. And I wasn't immune to that either when I was younger. It's only as I've matured that I realized what the word actually means and that conservatism is actually the center on the reactionary-conservative-progressive axis. I also learned that progressivism is mainly ideologies driven from academic circles who consider themselves an intellectual elite that should decide where society is headed and that those circles have been catastrophically wrong in the past with things like eugenics and communism.

I didn't mean to write off social conservatism. I just meant that it's unappealing to roughly half the country and it's unclear what liberals are supposed to tell men and women to discourage this behavior.

Conservatism offers no solutions here so we can safely write it off for this particular issue. There is no way to prevent content creators and media companies from running uncontrolled experiments to maximize advertising revenue or user engagement or whatever metric. In the USA we have the rule of law and constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression. The potential benefits of pushing right up to the line are so huge that there will be no voluntary restraint in the general case. Even if YouTube or Instagram were to restrict risque content the creators and consumers would eventually move on to a new service.

People have been denouncing prostitution as debasing, demoralizing, and distracting for as long as writing has been available, maybe longer.

Manipulating people with sex is nothing new, and we will keep finding new ways to do it with every new technological innovation.

Please don't conflate formal education with intelligence.

Brightest by what measure?

It seems like you're placing a lot of weight on the kind of intelligence that favors office work and ignoring all of the artists, builders, monks, healers and leaders whose names fill history books.

Brightest by your measure rarely get mentioned. Not to say historical impact is the most valuable metric, but it begs the question of what is your measure of brightness good for?

The ‘brightest’ can’t even figure out how to reproduce above replacement levels…

Swayed maybe, but definitely not controlled equally.

Can someone saying or doing something infuriatingly stupid make no difference to how sexually attractive they are?

The average civilian is more disposable than a service member. It is well known that a service member has more responsibilities and higher standards than their civilian counterparts. Hence the reason military experience is looked at with higher regard than a bachelors degree.

"Wait, that actually works on people?" is one of the more common hallmarks of the asexual experience. I always knew that sex sells but the extent to which it does is surprising to those of us that don't experience it. A whole other world. Especially for the segment of the space that are repulsed due to medical issues or difficult past experiences. The struggling religious segment probably gets it.

> I doubt recruits are allowed to show up wearing full makeup and long flowing hair to shoot internet videos without at least the authorization of their superiors

They can. As long as they’re not on duty, violating uniform regulations, or OPSEC, it’s pretty much fine.

> painting military life as cool.

So is the problem you have being the military using sex to sell(or recruit), or that their message is that the military is painted as being cool?

No evidence is given this is their actual job.

You're saying 75% of Gen Z (assumedly in the US) are either drug users or obese?

Good lord, that needs a source.