New Yorker article from a couple of months ago touches on some of these issues.
In 1979, an Oklahoma woman named Johnnie Mae Austin stopped getting mail from the Muscogee Nation. There were no more announcements of meetings, notices of elections, or news of monetary settlements. The problem wasn’t postal. Austin’s Muscogee citizenship had been erased by a new Muscogee constitution in which citizenship was defined “by blood,” words that named a fraught crossroads in Native and African American histories. The Muscogee people, also referred to as Creeks, were among the tribes that once enslaved people of African descent and that were required, in the wake of the Civil War, to accept them as tribal citizens. A tribal-enrollment census around the start of the twentieth century split the Muscogee citizenry into groups that were separate but by no means equal. One roll—the “by blood” roster—listed people of Creek heritage, while a second, “freedmen,” roll named Black Creek citizens, the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Austin’s ancestors appeared on the second roll. With the new constitution, Muscogee citizenship was reserved for those on the first roll, or their lineal descendants. And so Austin, after forty-seven years of being Creek, found her tribal identity legally and politically erased.
The article doesn’t do that though. Both her sisters deny they’re indigenous, deny the specific stories of a family life with a drunk Indian father and white mother and the rest of the stories she told, and there’s no genealogical evidence that her ansestors were associated with or were in the same area of the specific native American tribe she claimed to be from.
I found it interesting that someone so high profile would have such a tenuous support for her specific claims.
I don’t have a place to put this but online dating is the worst thing to happen to the prospect of developing meaningful relationships in human history.
I don’t feel strongly about the one I posted, I just think it’s gotta be worse than online dating sites.
The general argument on the porn one is that it fosters unrealistic expectations. Also addictions are a problem, which I’m sure can’t be great for real relationships.
Nothing I was just curious, I could see porn but hard for me to see online dating as bad, it seems like it allows for much better matches than you would find before randomly
Yeah, I agree with that. It’s hard for me to buy that online dating is even net negative, but I can imagine that argument. “Worst thing” ever seems impossible to swallow.
Met my current gf more than 10 years ago using OkCupid. I have no idea what the kids are using these days but am a big fan of interweb dating considering how much fun I had at the time and how well it worked out for us.
The good thing about online dating is kinda also the bad part.
Good: Exposure to more people theoretically makes it more likely to find a match. Also the algorithms should in theory serve up better matches than random (but people who believe that opposites attract or that partners should be complementary rather than similar might dispute that).
Bad: Access to lots of people can make people too picky and willing to bail and the first sign of trouble instead of sticking around and actually working on the relationship/learning how to compromise (a skill that comes in pretty handy in long term relationships).
I wouldn’t say it’s the worst thing that’s happened to dating, but the apps have definitely changed dating, and not all of the changes are positive.