One of my favorite podcasts, Triggernometry, asks the same final question of every guest: what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?
I’ve been saying that my outrage meter has been pegged for so long that I’m no longer sure when I’m supposed to be angry. I need people to hold up signs that say “applause” or “boo and hiss” so that I can produce on command the socially appropriate response.
“Behold, the field in which I grow my damns. Fix thine eyes upon it, and thou shalt know that it is barren.”
This is empirically false. For reference, as of 2025, just 25 countries have a woman serving as Head of State or Government. Women comprise only 22.9% of Cabinet-level leadership worldwide. At the current pace, parity in executive political power is over a century away.
As for your remarks about “good men” and “mediocre men”—I’ll refrain from analysis, except to observe that self-congratulation disguised as sociopolitical concern rarely ages well.
@therecursivist You seem to be saying that political power is most important, and heads of state particularly, as the indicator of the ascendant power of men as compared to women
I don’t share that view, but I see how it could be argued
Leaving that aside
My position that men are good at compassion even without being recognized for it is NOT self-congratulatory
I am a woman, and I made my comment from the female perspective.
I can imagine @tiredmoderate smirking at this misunderstanding 😏
Women are less active in online comment threads, but I know many who also appreciate how gentle strong men can be
"This is empirically false." No it isn't. The only "this" that makes sense for you to be referencing is my statement that women are winning more elections. You were pinpoint precise in refuting a claim, but it wasn't the claim I made, and I had to go re-read what I wrote to even surmise what claim you were pretending to refute.
If you're going to be precise, be precise from A to Z.
“Women are crushing men in education. They’re filling up doctor roles, winning more elections…”
Then, when pressed:
“I didn’t say they’re winning more elections than men.”
But… you did. The syntax is clear: “crushing men” → “filling roles” → “winning elections” reads as a sequential, comparative thesis. The framing wasn’t ambiguous—it was structural. If you meant “more than before”, you should have said that. “Crushing men” does not suggest historical trendlines; it implies surpassing.
And it wasn’t just the election claim—everything stated in that cluster was empirically off. The subjective remarks I didn’t evaluate, though I’ll note they weren’t to my taste.
Precision isn’t just about correcting others—it starts with how you frame your own claims.
“You seem to be saying that political power is most important, and heads of state particularly, as the indicator of the ascendant power of men as compared to women.”
No. That is not what I said. That is what you needed me to say to distract from the fact that your own statement—about women “crushing” men across sectors—collapsed the moment it met a fact check.
I cited executive political representation as one obvious counterpoint to your sweeping claim. I did not claim it was the sole metric of gender power distribution, nor suggest that statehood is the only meaningful domain. That interpretation is not a misunderstanding—it is a deliberate reduction, a strawman offered in soft tones to sound polite while rewriting the argument.
Then we get:
“My position that men are good at compassion even without being recognized for it is NOT self-congratulatory.”
If you must announce that your praise of men isn’t self-congratulatory, it already is.
And if your point is that compassion matters—fine. But let’s not pretend that inserting “even mediocre men” into a gendered virtue parade is anything but a lightly perfumed attempt at rebranding paternalism as quiet heroism.
And now the baited flourish:
“I am a woman… I made my comment from the female perspective.”
Ah, the gendered shield. As if declaring your demographic position inoculates your ideas from critique. But bad reasoning doesn’t become good just because it wears the correct skin.
Your appeal to gender here is not clarifying—it’s deflective. A tactical essentialism deployed to silence dissent, not strengthen dialogue.
Finally, the pièce de résistance:
“I too am tired of the demand for compassion.”
This might have been poignant, had it not arrived directly after a Hallmark soliloquy about how gentle men are. What exactly are you tired of—compassion itself, or having to recognize it when it arrives in someone else’s hands?
At least for me, "compassion fatigue" succinctly describes why I moved from liberal to conservative more generally as I aged. When you're young and you don't have any real power to do anything about the problems of the world, it costs you nothing to just throw around empathy for the world's suffering, because you're expecting someone else to fix it. When you're the one with the actual power and authority, though, and you have to make real decisions about what to do with your time and money, you have to actually control your compassion and learn to prioritize.
On the other side of compassion fatigue is honest self-awareness about your priorities. It's like, I'm glad you feel bad that people are suffering. But if you haven't put money on the table, I'm not sure you actually care. I've gotten a lot better at just saying, "Nope, don't care!"
Yes, and as we age we tend to accrue responsibilities too. Responsibilities for things in our immediate orbit, like a kid, or paying the heat bill. Endless empathy for giant gobs of strangers who claim to be suffering and never seem to stop claiming to suffer no matter how much help they get becomes a luxury. Annoying too, but a luxury.
*** "At least for me, "compassion fatigue" succinctly describes why I moved from liberal to conservative more generally as I aged. When you're young and you don't have any real power to do anything about the problems of the world, it costs you nothing to just throw around empathy for the world's suffering, because you're expecting someone else to fix it. When you're the one with the actual power and authority, though, and you have to make real decisions about what to do with your time and money, you have to actually control your compassion and learn to prioritize." ***
This is a brilliant analysis of why people who are younger generally tend to be more left-leaning. You said, "...it costs you nothing to just throw around empathy for the world's suffering, because you're expecting someone else to fix it." Absolutely true.
“It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.“
-Kierkegaard on why boredom is the root of all evil. Seems to fit here
I'll say it out loud: I think lot of it is an expression of Toxic Feminism on a mass global scale. Just as there is toxic masculinity that can be hard and violent, this unhinged identity politics and compassion (soft and subtle) is an expression of feminism gone berserk.
It's a primal scream for attention. A dance of narcissism with its cousins: Resentment, grudges, non-stop complaining, and blaming others...all on a mass scale...
We need to all tone down and stop blaming others for our karma.
An excellent term I'll be sure to use in the future. Sympathy is not an inexhaustible resource, at least for sane people who aren't completely tied to one specific political ideology.
There is a limit to empathy. I can care about my family and friends. And to a lesser degree, care about the people in my community. Perhaps I can care about the genocide victims in Gaza, and the war victimes in Ukraine and the ICE victims in America.
But what about the fire victims in Los Angeles? Or the fire victims in California. Or today in Canada?
And what about the war and famine victims in Sudan? Or Eritrea? Of flood victims in Bangladesh?
Ultimately we need to draw a personal line. And each of us needs to draw that line now, before being overwhelmed by events that are totally outside any part of our control and influence.
One thing for sure; our future will be filled with tests of our empathy for our fellow human beings. Perhaps it is a good moment to consider where our own personal limits are, before we are overwhelmed by the hopelessness and lack of control of our own existence.
It's not genocide. Kind of hurts the argument. 1.8 million Palestinians live in peace in Israel. If they wanted genocide they could just go door to door killing them. Also, real genocide victims can't stop the killing by surrendering.
There is no point in killing Palestinians in Israel that do all the work that Jews don't want to do for peanuts.
The point of killing Palestinians in Gaza is to steal their land, as the Jewish settlers have been illegally doing for decades, as declared illegal by the international courts and the UN.
If you don't understand that and condemn it for genocide, you must either be really, really stupid, or you are a culpable supporter of their genocide.
No! you have "correct" empathy which hurts for the children getting gender surgery, the girls being raped in the UK while the government looks away, the people destroyed by Covid scientists, "climate experts," "Transexual experts," the people being killed by illegal immigrants. And if you say that, "those people," the ones that have created and perpetuated this new set of corrupt morals, you will be villified by the same nauseating troup of liberal elites. They have no god, no moral absolutes and are speaking "their truth," as if we get to make it up.
It is pure evil. And they don't believe in evil or know it when they see it.
The problem with over-targeted compassion is that it, by nature, creates a stark contrast and identifies a culprit behind the need for that compassion. Group A wouldn't be in need of such unconditional compassion if not for the evils of Group B. Ergo, Group B is irredeemably evil, down to their last baby.
This is why the most self-appointed compassionate are also the most hostile and bigoted, and wholly unable to see it for its grotesque irony.
True compassion isn't conditional, it's universal. It sees and advocates for the humanity of *all*.
I’m so fatigued of feeling compassion for other people’s children. I’m a veritable well-spring of empathy and decency. Someone please shut these things off before I die of exhaustion.
Sure, we need to talk about things that only exist inside underdeveloped minds.
"Women are crushing men in education. They’re filling up doctor roles, winning more elections, making gains in a ton of directions. But not all directions, so every sex-based outreach program MUST go that direction. They get all the compassion, all the time, until activists find someone with better intersectional bonafides (more on that below)."
Women (as a group) are willing to leverage sympathy and use emotional manipulation, whereas men tend to desire usefulness more than sympathy, and be a bit more driven toward self-sacrifice. These tendencies are leading to an unbalanced and dysfunctional society.
Women are emotionally manipulating their way into college? They're leveraging sympathy to get licensed to practice medicine?
I don't totally disagree with you on the nature of female typical social strategy. I don't agree that women have a special monopoly on achieveing success despite being useless.
It kind of undermines your entire essay when the thing that "broke" you was you falling for a hoax spread about an innocent woman by online conspiracy theorists. Imane Khelif is a woman. She is not transgender. She is a cisgender, female-on-her-birth-certificate, has-a-naturally-occuring-vagina woman. The people accusing her of being a man were making it up.
If you paid more attention to that map earlier in your post, this would be obvious. When I first heard about Khelif I knew that the whole thing was a hoax as soon as I saw the phrase "Algerian boxer." Algeria is one of those oppressive Muslim countries you were talking about earlier. It isn't even legal to be trans in Algeria. There is no way that country would choose a trans person to represent them.
The Khelif debacle actually broke me the other way. Seeing so many people make an obvious hoax the centerpiece of their opposition to trans participation in sports made me completely cease caring about the issue.
Yep. My give a damn is busted.
I’m stealing this to reuse.
I’ve been saying that my outrage meter has been pegged for so long that I’m no longer sure when I’m supposed to be angry. I need people to hold up signs that say “applause” or “boo and hiss” so that I can produce on command the socially appropriate response.
“Behold, the field in which I grow my damns. Fix thine eyes upon it, and thou shalt know that it is barren.”
“Women are crushing men in education. They’re filling up doctor roles, winning more elections, making gains in a ton of directions. “
I’ve been waiting for years for education to be treated as a pink ghetto, not respected or valued anymore because it is too female.
I think it’s starting to happen
Compassion aside, we have bridges to build and trains to keep running
Good men, even mediocre men, are rather good at compassion and not making a big deal out of it
But there comes a time when someone has to clean up this one horse town
Yes. My compassion looks identical to indifference from the outside because I just quietly help fix the problem, then move on.
Men don't get enough credit for the Wars and and Fights they DON"T start
they mostly don't
they COULD
Strong men know when they chose not to throw down
women mostly don't see it
but they benefit from it
Actual good line.
This is empirically false. For reference, as of 2025, just 25 countries have a woman serving as Head of State or Government. Women comprise only 22.9% of Cabinet-level leadership worldwide. At the current pace, parity in executive political power is over a century away.
As for your remarks about “good men” and “mediocre men”—I’ll refrain from analysis, except to observe that self-congratulation disguised as sociopolitical concern rarely ages well.
@therecursivist You seem to be saying that political power is most important, and heads of state particularly, as the indicator of the ascendant power of men as compared to women
I don’t share that view, but I see how it could be argued
Leaving that aside
My position that men are good at compassion even without being recognized for it is NOT self-congratulatory
I am a woman, and I made my comment from the female perspective.
I can imagine @tiredmoderate smirking at this misunderstanding 😏
Women are less active in online comment threads, but I know many who also appreciate how gentle strong men can be
And I too am tired of the demand for compassion.
"This is empirically false." No it isn't. The only "this" that makes sense for you to be referencing is my statement that women are winning more elections. You were pinpoint precise in refuting a claim, but it wasn't the claim I made, and I had to go re-read what I wrote to even surmise what claim you were pretending to refute.
If you're going to be precise, be precise from A to Z.
“Women are crushing men in education. They’re filling up doctor roles, winning more elections…”
Then, when pressed:
“I didn’t say they’re winning more elections than men.”
But… you did. The syntax is clear: “crushing men” → “filling roles” → “winning elections” reads as a sequential, comparative thesis. The framing wasn’t ambiguous—it was structural. If you meant “more than before”, you should have said that. “Crushing men” does not suggest historical trendlines; it implies surpassing.
And it wasn’t just the election claim—everything stated in that cluster was empirically off. The subjective remarks I didn’t evaluate, though I’ll note they weren’t to my taste.
Precision isn’t just about correcting others—it starts with how you frame your own claims.
First, the claim:
“You seem to be saying that political power is most important, and heads of state particularly, as the indicator of the ascendant power of men as compared to women.”
No. That is not what I said. That is what you needed me to say to distract from the fact that your own statement—about women “crushing” men across sectors—collapsed the moment it met a fact check.
I cited executive political representation as one obvious counterpoint to your sweeping claim. I did not claim it was the sole metric of gender power distribution, nor suggest that statehood is the only meaningful domain. That interpretation is not a misunderstanding—it is a deliberate reduction, a strawman offered in soft tones to sound polite while rewriting the argument.
Then we get:
“My position that men are good at compassion even without being recognized for it is NOT self-congratulatory.”
If you must announce that your praise of men isn’t self-congratulatory, it already is.
And if your point is that compassion matters—fine. But let’s not pretend that inserting “even mediocre men” into a gendered virtue parade is anything but a lightly perfumed attempt at rebranding paternalism as quiet heroism.
And now the baited flourish:
“I am a woman… I made my comment from the female perspective.”
Ah, the gendered shield. As if declaring your demographic position inoculates your ideas from critique. But bad reasoning doesn’t become good just because it wears the correct skin.
Your appeal to gender here is not clarifying—it’s deflective. A tactical essentialism deployed to silence dissent, not strengthen dialogue.
Finally, the pièce de résistance:
“I too am tired of the demand for compassion.”
This might have been poignant, had it not arrived directly after a Hallmark soliloquy about how gentle men are. What exactly are you tired of—compassion itself, or having to recognize it when it arrives in someone else’s hands?
At least for me, "compassion fatigue" succinctly describes why I moved from liberal to conservative more generally as I aged. When you're young and you don't have any real power to do anything about the problems of the world, it costs you nothing to just throw around empathy for the world's suffering, because you're expecting someone else to fix it. When you're the one with the actual power and authority, though, and you have to make real decisions about what to do with your time and money, you have to actually control your compassion and learn to prioritize.
On the other side of compassion fatigue is honest self-awareness about your priorities. It's like, I'm glad you feel bad that people are suffering. But if you haven't put money on the table, I'm not sure you actually care. I've gotten a lot better at just saying, "Nope, don't care!"
Yes, and as we age we tend to accrue responsibilities too. Responsibilities for things in our immediate orbit, like a kid, or paying the heat bill. Endless empathy for giant gobs of strangers who claim to be suffering and never seem to stop claiming to suffer no matter how much help they get becomes a luxury. Annoying too, but a luxury.
*** "At least for me, "compassion fatigue" succinctly describes why I moved from liberal to conservative more generally as I aged. When you're young and you don't have any real power to do anything about the problems of the world, it costs you nothing to just throw around empathy for the world's suffering, because you're expecting someone else to fix it. When you're the one with the actual power and authority, though, and you have to make real decisions about what to do with your time and money, you have to actually control your compassion and learn to prioritize." ***
This is a brilliant analysis of why people who are younger generally tend to be more left-leaning. You said, "...it costs you nothing to just throw around empathy for the world's suffering, because you're expecting someone else to fix it." Absolutely true.
You might find this interesting.
https://ogre.substack.com/p/liberals-and-the-philosophy-of-shampoo
Good one,
It is a Western fetish though… outside of it, everything is shit, and then we have tiers of shit, usually worse the further south or east you go too…
And the West did this to itself, because it was bored.
“It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.“
-Kierkegaard on why boredom is the root of all evil. Seems to fit here
“And the West did this to itself, because it was bored.”
Oof.
My 'leftist' period lasted about from age 23 to 28 and then it died, thank God, and I am a resolute centrist. This is a good analysis.
I'll say it out loud: I think lot of it is an expression of Toxic Feminism on a mass global scale. Just as there is toxic masculinity that can be hard and violent, this unhinged identity politics and compassion (soft and subtle) is an expression of feminism gone berserk.
It's a primal scream for attention. A dance of narcissism with its cousins: Resentment, grudges, non-stop complaining, and blaming others...all on a mass scale...
We need to all tone down and stop blaming others for our karma.
An excellent term I'll be sure to use in the future. Sympathy is not an inexhaustible resource, at least for sane people who aren't completely tied to one specific political ideology.
There is a limit to empathy. I can care about my family and friends. And to a lesser degree, care about the people in my community. Perhaps I can care about the genocide victims in Gaza, and the war victimes in Ukraine and the ICE victims in America.
But what about the fire victims in Los Angeles? Or the fire victims in California. Or today in Canada?
And what about the war and famine victims in Sudan? Or Eritrea? Of flood victims in Bangladesh?
Ultimately we need to draw a personal line. And each of us needs to draw that line now, before being overwhelmed by events that are totally outside any part of our control and influence.
One thing for sure; our future will be filled with tests of our empathy for our fellow human beings. Perhaps it is a good moment to consider where our own personal limits are, before we are overwhelmed by the hopelessness and lack of control of our own existence.
It's not genocide. Kind of hurts the argument. 1.8 million Palestinians live in peace in Israel. If they wanted genocide they could just go door to door killing them. Also, real genocide victims can't stop the killing by surrendering.
There is no point in killing Palestinians in Israel that do all the work that Jews don't want to do for peanuts.
The point of killing Palestinians in Gaza is to steal their land, as the Jewish settlers have been illegally doing for decades, as declared illegal by the international courts and the UN.
If you don't understand that and condemn it for genocide, you must either be really, really stupid, or you are a culpable supporter of their genocide.
Which is it?
My empathy circle gets smaller by the day.
Ok. I think we agree.
No! you have "correct" empathy which hurts for the children getting gender surgery, the girls being raped in the UK while the government looks away, the people destroyed by Covid scientists, "climate experts," "Transexual experts," the people being killed by illegal immigrants. And if you say that, "those people," the ones that have created and perpetuated this new set of corrupt morals, you will be villified by the same nauseating troup of liberal elites. They have no god, no moral absolutes and are speaking "their truth," as if we get to make it up.
It is pure evil. And they don't believe in evil or know it when they see it.
The problem with over-targeted compassion is that it, by nature, creates a stark contrast and identifies a culprit behind the need for that compassion. Group A wouldn't be in need of such unconditional compassion if not for the evils of Group B. Ergo, Group B is irredeemably evil, down to their last baby.
This is why the most self-appointed compassionate are also the most hostile and bigoted, and wholly unable to see it for its grotesque irony.
True compassion isn't conditional, it's universal. It sees and advocates for the humanity of *all*.
Everyone’s give a shitter is broken
I'll keep this in mind.
Since I've lived it. And changed for it.
I’m so fatigued of feeling compassion for other people’s children. I’m a veritable well-spring of empathy and decency. Someone please shut these things off before I die of exhaustion.
Sure, we need to talk about things that only exist inside underdeveloped minds.
"Women are crushing men in education. They’re filling up doctor roles, winning more elections, making gains in a ton of directions. But not all directions, so every sex-based outreach program MUST go that direction. They get all the compassion, all the time, until activists find someone with better intersectional bonafides (more on that below)."
Women (as a group) are willing to leverage sympathy and use emotional manipulation, whereas men tend to desire usefulness more than sympathy, and be a bit more driven toward self-sacrifice. These tendencies are leading to an unbalanced and dysfunctional society.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/bands-of-brothers
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-feminization-of-politics
Women are emotionally manipulating their way into college? They're leveraging sympathy to get licensed to practice medicine?
I don't totally disagree with you on the nature of female typical social strategy. I don't agree that women have a special monopoly on achieveing success despite being useless.
Spot on.
It kind of undermines your entire essay when the thing that "broke" you was you falling for a hoax spread about an innocent woman by online conspiracy theorists. Imane Khelif is a woman. She is not transgender. She is a cisgender, female-on-her-birth-certificate, has-a-naturally-occuring-vagina woman. The people accusing her of being a man were making it up.
If you paid more attention to that map earlier in your post, this would be obvious. When I first heard about Khelif I knew that the whole thing was a hoax as soon as I saw the phrase "Algerian boxer." Algeria is one of those oppressive Muslim countries you were talking about earlier. It isn't even legal to be trans in Algeria. There is no way that country would choose a trans person to represent them.
The Khelif debacle actually broke me the other way. Seeing so many people make an obvious hoax the centerpiece of their opposition to trans participation in sports made me completely cease caring about the issue.