Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Yes on both counts. The sexual revolution and the free love movement promoted the idea that casual sex should be consequence-free (which that generation of Westerners fully internalised, for the most part) - then technological developments caused social atomisation which actually removed most of the indirect social consequences for bad behaviour among "cads" and "rakes".
It's possible to imagine an alternate history where we had the same technological developments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that we had, but not preceded by the dramatic social liberalisation of the sexual revolution. In this counterfactual world, social atomisation still happens, but sexual misconduct (e.g. impregnating a girl and running off on her) remains so aggressively stigmatised that most men refrain from it of their own accord. What I'm describing actually sounds fairly similar to modern Japan and Korea, in which less than 10% of live births are out of wedlock, as opposed to the West in which they're 30% at the absolute minimum (granted, more abortions are carried out in South Korea than in the US or UK, so it's not quite as rosy as I'm making it out to be).
Folamh3
5hr ago
One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.
And because the most determined pro-Palestine activists made sure to tear down all the posters of abducted Israeli children, in an effort to quell the associated cognitive dissonance.
Due to demographic implosion, families and friends' circles are smaller, so your friends and their friends have fewer or no sisters, nieces, cousins and other friends to introduce to you even if they want to help you out.
True. "I married my sibling's friend" was a pretty common route of courtship in generations past, which largely doesn't exist anymore as a result of smaller family sizes.
To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.
Neatly encapsulating why men and women alike complain about all the bad behaviour on dating apps. If there's no overlap in social circles between you and the person you're dating, there are no social consequences for bad behaviour, so feel free to ghost to your heart's content. It's not that the people who use dating apps are necessarily uniquely shitty people, or that dating apps select for people who are uniquely shitty (though both of these are true to some extent, particularly the latter): it's that dating apps don't incentivise people to behave pro-socially.
You're also gesturing at precisely the "social atomisation" thing I'm describing: a few generations ago, asking out a girl with whom you have no overlap in social circles simply wasn't an option. A hundred years ago, if you lived in a town of a few thousand people and tried to ditch a girl after getting her pregnant, her father would be hammering on your front door with a shotgun before the day was out. Nowadays if you do that, she has no recourse.
It does make one rather cynical about human nature when you realise that a lot of people (not a majority or anything, just a lot) are operating on the basis not of "I should treat this girl with respect because it's the right thing to do and it's how I'd like to be treated" but "I should treat this girl with respect, because if I don't she'll tell everyone and it'll come back to bite me in the ass". The sexual revolution is basically a prolonged experiment in what happens when you take away the personal incentive not to be shitty to girls that you want to fuck but don't want to wife.
Well, duh. If you ask them about a RANDOM GUY, of course they'll react like that, because they don't see 'random' guys as attractive.
I don't know if the author would have gotten a different answer if she'd specified "How would you feel if an attractive man you don't know started talking to you in an elevator?"
I think you have your causality backwards. It's not that people don't bother asking people out in person anymore because they'd rather use the apps: it's that Western society has become massively atomised as a result of technological progress, which is a void that the apps have stepped in to inexpertly fill.
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person? Common examples included i) a nice girl you met at church; ii) a colleague at work; iii) a classmate; or iv) a friend of a friend. Why i) is no longer viable is self-explanatory. Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply, and you also run into the problem of a paucity of available women - if you're a socially awkward man in college, odds are good that you're pursuing a degree which is highly sex-segregated (computer science, engineering etc.).
That leaves iv). It's impossible to ask a friend of a friend on a date if a) you don't have any friends, or all of your friends are online friends; or b) all of your friends are people you met through an extremely sex-segregated common interest (Warhammer, D&D, coding, esports, rationalist-adjacent subreddit spinoffs etc.) - something that the internet and social media facilitates far too easily. (People self-segregrating into ideological echo chambers is only the tip of the iceberg: self-segregrating into echo chambers of people who like Obscure Hobby X or want to fuck toasters is the major underlying cause of the demise of any shared monoculture and the enshittification of Western society. I and everyone reading this are guilty of it.)
So you're left with cold approaches: going up to girls in bars or nightclubs. Again, not a problem for charming and socially adept men; big problem for the socially awkward millennials/zoomers you're criticising. Hard to blame them for making a beeline for the apps instead.
Of course it's easy to criticise Millennial and Gen Z adult men for not taking proactive steps to organically encounter single women in real life. Obviously talking to strangers halfway across the globe is not a great way to get laid in real life; nor is spending every day in your local Games Workshop. But the thing is, they didn't make this decision as adults: they made it when their parents gave them a smartphone as teenagers, and all the years of adolescence they should have spent ironing out the kinks in their patter have been squandered watching YouTube and Twitch instead. Gen Z boys are starting college barely more acquainted with the rules of social interaction IRL than Gen X 13-year-olds were, for reasons that are not entirely their fault: no one here thinks someone's life should be ruined because of a stupid decision they made when they were 12, a decision which directly harms only themselves and no one else (but indirectly harms society as a whole, obviously).
And your assumption that dating apps killed traditional courtship hinges on the questionable presumption that Millennial/Gen Z women are exactly as receptive to a stranger asking them out as Gen X women were in their youth. But I don't think they are, and I think the fact that they aren't is part of the problem. See this great article:
I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
See also (coming back to "Untitled" above) innumerable feminist comics about how it's creepy for men to ask a woman out in a coffee shop or in a library or in college or on the third moon of Venus or whatever. There are plenty of women who are far less receptive to being asked out by strangers than their mothers were, and make no secret of that fact. Obviously the women writing these comics don't represent all women, but the men reading and internalising these comics don't necessarily know that, and everyone ends up poorer for it. If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries. The typical "if you're reading it, it's not for you" dynamic.
Folamh3
1d ago
If you emigrate to a country at the age of (say) 61, you are almost certainly going to be a net drain on that country's resources for far longer than you will be a positive contributor, even if you work for a few years.
Folamh3
1d ago
Folamh3
1d ago
I mean, okay, but I was just laughing at that guy's joke. Is it against the rules to say "ha ha, your joke was funny"?
Folamh3
2d ago
Any recommendations for free AI video generators that can generate 1080p footage at 24fps minimum? Preferably ones which can be accessed through a browser and don't require me to install anything.
Folamh3
2d ago
Far Cry 2 did very little for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed 3 and have been meaning to replay it.
I've never heard of Intravenous before, it looks interesting.
I've tried playing SWAT 4 numerous times and invariably give up no later than the fifth or sixth mission. Great game but it is haaaard.
Folamh3
2d ago
I watched a video review of it years ago, I wonder if it's been patched into unrecognisability since.
Folamh3
2d ago
Thanks, I should have said "none of the groups targeted by the communist regime and specifically listed in the OP".
Great post. I have a couple of quibbles:
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Describing the approach the communist leaders adopted towards their enemies as "identity politics". As I and many others use the term, "identity politics" refers to politics based on immutable identity characteristics (race, sex, caste, ethnicity etc.). It appears that (with the possible exception of the aristocracy, depending on how hereditary privileges worked at the time), none of the groups targeted by the communist regime meet this description: kulaks can sell their land and immediately become non-kulaks, industrialists can sell their factories. By contrast, even non-practising Jews were targeted for extermination by the Nazis; nothing a Tutsi does can make him any less of a Tutsi.
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Describing the Reign of Terror as a "pogrom". I've only ever seen this term used to describe a systemic mass killing of Jews. I understand that you're using it figuratively, but it seems ripe for misinterpretation.
Folamh3
2d ago
Ooh I've never heard of this one and I'm cool with PS2-era graphics, thanks!
Folamh3
2d ago
I've tried to play it several times but it never really clicked for me. The same was true of System Shock 2, which finally did click for me two years ago. I bought Thief shortly afterwards as part of the same "old school immersive sim" stable, and have been meaning to give it a try for a few months.
Folamh3
3d ago
Played it, really enjoyed it. The stealth parts of New Order reminded me of it.
Folamh3
3d ago
I recently played Wolfenstein: The New Order, which was pretty good, and found that my favourite parts of the game were the stealth segments in which you're sneaking around popping off soldiers from a distance with a silenced pistol. Sadly The New Order doesn't commit to the bit: the stealth segments are optional, and there are plenty of missions in which you're forced to go in guns blazing.
I'd love to play a game which was essentially just the stealth segments from The New Order for the entire runtime. What I'm looking for is games with the following criteria:
- Played from a first-person perspective
- Has a combat system (ergo excluding games in which the player character is defenseless e.g. Amnesia, the xenomorph sequences from Alien Isolation)
- Combat system is based on guns - no unarmed or melee combat (except maybe takedowns/stealth kills)
- Player is forced to be stealthy throughout - stealth is not optional (ergo excluding immersive sims in which you have the option of combat, stealth or diplomacy)
- Player character is vulnerable and can take on no more than one or two enemies before becoming overwhelmed
For what it's worth I disagree that Ireland isn't "particularly woke". I mean, the general population finds wokeness bizarre and alienating, but that's true of every country in which wokeness has found any kind of purchase: it's an ideology by and for the elites, and for the most part the elites in Ireland are just as woke as in any other Anglophone nation. We have self-ID (and the attendant rows about males in women's prisons and sports); controversies over youth gender medicine; massive BLM protests in 2020; the incidence of words like "racism", "transphobia", "homophobia" etc. in our two national newspapers has skyrocketed since 2010, and demands for draconian hate speech legislation - in short, everything you'd expect from a woke nation. The point I was trying to make is that Irish support for the Palestinian cause predates Ireland's great awokening by decades, and pro-Palestine marches were a common sight to see long before anyone here had heard of a preferred pronoun.
I also think @2rafa is being a bit sweeping by putting a slash between leftist and woke. Many wokes are liberals, many leftists are not wokes, although they do both tend to favour the Palestinian cause if for different reasons.
Folamh3
4d ago
What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel?
Brendan O'Neill has an interesting write-up today about Bambie Thug and the historical links between Ireland and Israel.
Folamh3
4d ago
To clarify, I've never been reported to the authorities for asking a girl out either. I'm not arguing that any man who's less than maximally attractive who asks out the wrong girl will inevitably end up with his career destroyed and his life in ruins - that's preposterous. I'm merely arguing that there has been a concerted effort among feminists to stigmatise male dating behaviour which would have been seen as perfectly innocuous a generation ago; that the most severe consequences for a social media cancellation campaign can be disastrous for men targeted by them (e.g. the Shitty Media Men List, the more recent "Are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups); and that this produces an inevitable chilling effect on the behaviour of socially awkward men who are aware of the new norms (which is most of them). Much as cancellers cancel people who contradict woke orthodoxy in order to send a message to onlookers, the cancellation of men for being "creepy" (i.e asking out a woman who isn't interested) is intended to send a message to socially awkward men. It may well that your risk of professional repercussions as a result of a particular socially awkward man asking out the wrong girl are only 1 in 1,000, or 10,000, or a 100,000 - but if it makes him 10 or even 5% more risk-averse (and if every socially awkward man is making the same calculation) that will have massive knock-on effects on the dating economy, the loneliness/sexlessness epidemic and the fertility rate.
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