100ProofTollBooth
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
Largely, yes. The bright side, however, is that there is more than enough good stuff that you'll never have to fall back to the personal novellas.
I'd personally recommend jumping in the deep end: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Remember it was published in the 1980s and probably penned throughout the 1970s. I wonder if any editor at a publishing house today would even read draft chapter nowadays.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
without Natural Law I can retort "What's wrong with disease? Why should we value being healthy over sick? Sickness is just an arbitrary category that society puts on those who do not conform to it's expectations."
And we arrive at the bonkers ideology of fat acceptance.
I think a compounding (and also, maybe somehow, complementing?) factor here is that Natural Law is implications in the direction of morality and moral absolutism. In the same way that arbitrariness creates more chaos and leads to negative outcomes for society, moral relativism creates far more pain, chaos, and evil than it "defeats" through its message of radical acceptance. A dirty trick that a lot of intellectually dishonest folks play is to intentionally conflate something amoral with something definitely moral(istic). Take for example the fat acceptance movement...he/she isn't a bad person for being fat! Of course. No one is disagreeing here. But a doctor will tell you you are an unhealthy person for being obese. Unhealthy? How dare you.
But excessive moralism has always been a favorite safety blanket of folks of all stripes. People have always traded social status for anything and everything else for more than they ought to for all of time. Being "right" may, in fact, feel a million times better than being independent and self-sufficient.
But, to quote the noted bard, Tyga, "I don't want to be famous / I just want to be rich."
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
I really like the additional block about Angry Kid and his interaction with jailbait because it illustrates a pernicious part of the problem that is both underappreciated and extremely hard to remedy...
A very small percentage of true sociopaths / anti-social personalities can destroy entire communities, especially if those communities are already fragile, and this can be done without the sociopath's overt attempt (i.e. "all I said was x").
Raphael Mangual talks about this in his book Criminal Injustice and, if memory serves, Roland Fryer had a paper that analyzed the disastrous effects of even a single murder on a neighborhood in (again, going off memory here) St. Louis.
I think the short, mid, and long term solution is more cops. A HELL of a lot more cops. First, this would be to simply dissuade crime. Yes, the sociopaths don't care, but the young "hoppers" who are just getting acquainted with crime will still avoid a purse snatch, or a hand-to-hand deal, etc. if there's a police cruiser within line of sight. Second, more seasoned cops can be freed up to perform Community Policing (don't worry, TollBooth hasn't go Prog on y'all) .... what I mean is acting as intelligence agents ... without calling it that ... because something something constitution.
You want the veteran cops creating detailed reports of the network of crime in a given area, with special attention paid to those sociopaths. That attention could be quite obvious - meaning that the "target" ought to know the Cops are watching him or her closely. Optimistically, this would hopefully have the same impact as incarceration. That is, creating a "dead zone" for the sociopath's criminal capabilities. At the very least, the second the target commits a violent crime, the arrest could be swift.
I sort of think that America has an over-incarceration problem, but not because we're just chucking all the kids with joints into prison. Again, reading Criminal Injustice, your average prison (not jail) inmate has over a dozen arrests and more than a handful of felony charges. We give our Junior Varsity criminals a lot of time to practice and then get serious with them after they do some Big League crime. The solution, IMHO, is to over-emphasize the front of the funnel; more arrests more frequently, more visible police presence always.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
The Constitution, and hundreds of years of precedent after it (so, precedent relative to today), prevents arrest without clearing what is the highest barrier for evidence and evidence collection in the Western World.
The "retired cop in a diner" would say something like "Every Cop knows that Bad Leroy Brown is running the drug market on the South Side. But he's never actually in the room with drugs, or on phones, and no one will testify against him, so we can't indict."
This is actually a major recurring theme in The Wire. Where the kingpins generally are so far removed from the street that indicting them is a long term game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile ,the chaos that results from their empires destroys a city and then only "high visibility" solution is to "rip and run" - i.e. engage in low level arrests of minor players in an effort to clean up the streets.
The civil liberties slippery slope is real. We can't, as a society, just start making exceptions because "everybody says Leroy Brown is the big man around the way."
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
I can't say with a lot of specific certainty as I don't know those policing systems much at all.
I know that the concept of civil liberties and privacy are fundamentally weaker. For instance, I know that there has been at least an official police visit to folks who have posted offensive language on twitter. Not an arrest, per se, but an official sanctioned visit to the domicile. The threshold for what would take a warrant in the USA is much lower. I believe the language is "vital to an ongoing investigation" at the discretion of the police themselves - no judge needed.
So, assuming I'm not wildly off base with my statements above (which are, admittedly, fuzzy at best) ... A constable in the UK would hear that Leroy Brown is a bad dude from the local toughs and then, presumably, launch and official investigation. This would allow Constable Fish-N-Chips to surveil Mr. Brown and search his domicile (again, I think) with near impunity. No such thing as off-limits or 'non-pertinent' information. It's a 24/7 (or as much time as the cops feel like) surveillance and waiting game until Mr. Brown somehow commits a crime with prosecuting.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
I think it's important to remember how complex manned spaceflight is and how chronically little attention is paid to end-to-end documentation. In fact, a big part of me thinks that utterly "complete" documentation is impossible because latent knowledge is so pervasive that sometimes you don't even realize you're using it as part of a step-by-step process. Furthermore, documentation outside of end user focused documentation is more about thinking through problems than a totally exhaustive record what what happened when and why for what reasons.
An interesting thought experiment I like to run with my developer friends; think of the most complex yet elegant piece of software you can think of...maybe the Linux kernel? Could Linux Torvals (or anyone) rebuild it from scratch so that its roughly functionally the same ... probably. Would the structure of the code be anything like it is .... probably not.
NASA engineers definitely know, remember (in an institutional sense), and appreciate the broad strokes of slinging a rocket at the moon, but its day one for all the details again.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
I think it's just hardcore in-group testing. "We wanted to create a group where just getting into it meant demonstrating extreme commitment ... but in a purely "I BELIEVE" way." My main evidence for this is the Behind The Curve documentary which shows that the main Flat Earth dude was just looking for a girlfriend and the main Flat Earth lady was just looking for a boyfriend (I think after a divorce or death?) and so they pre-tested the hell out of each other with the Flat Earth community and now have super hard to break enforced bonding via shared delusional belief.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
I have a heavy prior against this conspiracy theory based on the fact that running a presidential campaign is incredibly stressful and chaotic yet Trump (despite running a, shall we say, creative campaign) never had a major logistical or basic operational fuck up. He didn't miss a debate or a big event to my knowledge.
But.....
I remember reading articles about him being chronically late to rallies. This was often portrayed as Trump being a prima donna and resisting taking the stage until he was damn well ready. But what if it was actually a Benny Hill scene behind the scenes and he was arriving just in time (or very fucking late) to event after event and just getting up to the stage and saying whatever the hell was on his mind. Therein lies my second "Damn it, @FiveHourMarathon might have something here" idea --- Trump's relationship with his rally crowds was legendary. It really was him at his Zenith. I wonder how much that turned into a forest fire creating its own wind and propelling Trump into the mindset of "no, actually, voters want me to be President."
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
Any sort of legislation mandating nutrition facts at sit-down restaurants would end with class action lawsuits.
"Why does it taste so much better at Applebys / Cheesecake Factory / Ruth's Chris / Nobu than what I make it at home, I'm a good cook!" Because that stuff is straight up loaded with salt, fat (usually butter), and sugar (the white death) to levels you would never even consider at home. The big "fancy" Italian spots like Maggiano's (spellcheck) are especially egregious here where their seemingly large menus are the same half dozen ingredients recombined and then coated in some variety of unbelievable fat-and-sugar sauce.
Quick aside: I fucking love all of those kind of places and consider them to be the crowning achievements of Western Society. Fight me
But the fact that people eating there don't have to actually look at the quantifiable hated they're laying down on their gastrointestinal and endocrine systems means that the meal is guilt free. In some weird backwards-economic-behavior way, I think the mid-tier expensive ones make people think that, because it was so pricey, it must be some level higher on the health scale. I believe this to be false. I think on a value-and-health adjusted basis, McDonalds/Chipotles are probably the best on the planet. I think prom-dinner-fancy places (Maggianos, Cheescake factory etc.) are heinously expensive and disaster for the body.
But fuck it, lava cake makes Mrs. Tollbooth frisky AF and your boy can go HAM on those breadsticks.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
Plus one to the above, and I'll double down on it.
Befriend some of the women. Which ones? The ones you find most attractive. Why? If you make it completely clear you are friend-zoing her utterly at the beginning she'll eventually invite you out with her friends and now you're in a 1-male to x-females situation with a heap of social proof from the start of the evening. There is also an extremely good chance that she is "covertly" setting one of the friends up with you.
The key here is that you're doing this within the context of a group dynamic wherein you can (hopefully, and also necessarily) demonstrate some higher status. It's not about being a wallflower and then awkwardly asking to be friends on the side. Demonstrated status and social proof are the coins of the realm. The problem is when guys try to spend them the same place the make them. This is how, at best, you get into a potentially risky office romance or, at worst, get escorted out of the office by HR and/or security.
In group social proof and status is not, however, easily transferrable. Think of groups as countries with different currencies. It's hard to spend it directly in a group within which you did not build it. Have you ever heard a guy in a bar talking about how he has such-and-such a fancy job or was friends with Johnny WhoDat, the biggest waterbed dealer on the West Side? That's an attempt to currency exchange social proof / status. It fails. What you have in your book club is an exchange agent. She, as a trusted member of multiple groups, can port all of that built up social proof and status you have from the book club out into other groups. In fact, that you arrive at these new groups with such a high endorsement introduction automatically jump starts your relative status within the new group. Go for it.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
Mash both together.
Multi-day arduous hike with friends who you would call closest or just one circle outside of that. I would recommend all the same sex, but I don't think that's a hard and fast rule for everyone. Get fucking broken together (not literally, safety first, I just mean hours of hard hiking). Experience what hours of shared silence is like. Notice how your emotions start influencing one another. You know you're doing well when you start knowing when each other need to eat or shit.
Mentally multiply this by 1000. That's Men in Combat.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
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As long as you we're 50+ 15 years ago, this advice is still useful.
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"but when they give their own version of the explanation in their own words it's just incoherent nonsense." True. The sad fact of the matter is that both men and women have such little knowledge of courtship and how mate selection works. This is because it used to be embedded in socially approved rituals (think 1960s and earlier ... asking a girl to the sock hop, what "going for a drive" actually meant, the term "going steady" etc. etc.) When those rituals started to disappear through the 80s and 90s as women grew up with more fundamental autonomy, no new rituals replaced them. Fortunately, the underlying truth became a object of study. What's so interesting about real Social Dynamics / Sexyual strategy is how universal it is to all of human civilization post the emergence of agriculturalism and larg(er) scale pastoralism.
I'm getting out of focus here, so suffice it to say - most people have no idea how or why they've ever gotten laid - male or female (though probably women have a bit more front of mind intuition about this in general). That's the reason why you get bad advice.
Nobody gets to opt out of playing status games. It isn't possible. You can choose to play them well and retain integrity. That's the good news. The bad news is that status game sociopaths exist and will blow those with morals and ethics out of the water for some amount of time before their local society decides to exile them. The point there is to not get jaded and enjoy your own life.
100ProofTollBooth
11mo ago
But if you're in an atomized society where you've moved into a new city 2 years ago and all of your neighbors are people who have also moved here within the past couple years, each from a different place, that's not an option. The strategy to only trust and befriend people who are vouched for is equivalent to having no friends.
This is accurate if you've made the choice to delegate personal autonomy to the group.
That is the path of most.
Reclaim your autonomy. Determine what you see as fruitful.
100ProofTollBooth
9mo ago
While I can't quite bring myself to call casual sex immoral, I can definitely stand on terming it anti-social and/or degenerative to society.
First, two major starting assumptions:
(1) The reasons people commit murder in all non-nomadic societies across epochs can be roughly grouped into three broad areas: Money / resources, social standing or prestige, and sexual partner access or exclusivity.
(2) The Judeo-Christian theory of marriage, which has strongly influenced secular marriage laws in western societies, is concerned with regulating sexual activity to ensure more couples are starting more families instead of a very, very few percentage of men impregnating everyone, leaving much of their progeny to fend for themselves and, if the local community is small enough, getting to really thorny issues around incest and inbreeding in just a few generations. Long term monogamous pair bonding that produces above replacement level births is the best way in humans have come up with for building long lasting societies that persist over multiple centuries if not longer.
Any personal sexual strategy that ignores the first assumption (why murder?) and is directly in opposition to the second (marriage is good and we should be marriage-like even if we aren't doing the vows/ring/contract thing) is degenerative at the societal level even if it is well managed at the individual level. I think a really useful analogy is hard drugs like heroin or even cocaine. Why isn't there a sincere decriminalization / legalization movement for those drugs the way there is/was one for marijuana? Is it so hard to imagine people "responsibly" using cocaine / heroin in the privacy of their own homes? Sure, if they use it and then go out and engage in other behavior that's illegal or antisocial, we arrest them for that secondary behavior. But what's so wrong with just the use itself?
Well, the standard argument (that I agree with) goes "it's just far too high of a risk that even infrequent use of cocaine and heroin will result in extremely damaging behaviors." This doesn't even touch on the much stronger risk of addiction and the secondary degenerative behaviors that go towards supporting an addiction.
Sex is extremely powerful and therefore poses some real risk - again - at the aggregate societal level. There are certainly people out there who can find casual sex partners who understand that they are casual sex partners and both parties (or more than two if you're into that ;-) ) can leave the experience feeling fine. But, in my estimation, the vast majority of society cannot, especially over repeated trials. This brings up one important additional point related to body count.
Hyping female virginity is odd in a society with technology that allows us to determine paternal identity. No one who recommends low body county for women says this (in the West) because "how do we figure out who the kid's dad is?!?" No, the argument - often poorly formed - is that there is something suspicious about a woman who sleeps around with multiple guys even if both she and those guys are up front about the casual nature of the relationship. She is seen as somehow less valuable because of these repeated liaisons. Let's throw in a trope (because culture wars are fun) that our hypothetical female in this scenario also has some trendy tattoos, several piercings, and rotates through hair-dying phases. Why is this woman both often so compelling yet so reviled? Risk. She is signaling her high risk tolerance - preference even. Well, why is that bad? People are allowed to make their own risk assessments of their partners. True, but an overall higher risk tolerant society, especially at the point of family creation, will start to see higher base levels of instability. This doesn't guarantee fast and radical demise of the society as a whole, but it can absolutely raise the base levels of violent interpersonal conflict.
(A quick aside: Substitute in a Andrew Tate kind of fellow bedding random models at will for the female in our above scenario if you like - I don't think the responsibility in casual sex is anything other than equal across sexes).
So, what to do about casual sex in a society that now absolutely condones and even actively supports it? The first and obvious answer is to simply reject it. I'm not saying "virgin until marriage" but I am saying serial monogamy (with relationships lasting in several months) or celibacy / masturbation. In terms of finding a good partner, explicitly ask them about things like body count, perspectives on casual sex etc. If they adhere to the default line of "people shouldn't be judged on their sexual history!" well ... you have your answer, don't you?
From a policy level, I'd love to see massive bonuses for earlier family formation and marriage (i.e. you get huge tax incentives to get married and procreate before 30) ... however, I feel like this is legally really hard to do and would get into a whole strong of Supreme Court cases. There are more intelligent legal minds on The Motte who can comment. A general trend to support more sexual modesty would help, but that's not going to happen. Structured dating is something I'm sort of optimistic on. There's a tacit acknowledgement that the big dating apps create a tyranny of choices for women, and a desert/starvation feedback loop for most men. I've (anecdotally) seen a trend back towards social-group expansion dating where women won't go out with someone who has been "endorsed" by a friend. This also carries with it the added friction of not wanting to be that girl/guy in the friend group who just bounces around from bed to bed. (A fun question to ask related to this is "Sure, people shouldn't be judged on their sexual histories ... how many friends do you have who are avowed sluts / cocksmen?")
Wrapping up where I started, because casual sex can be consensual in a way that murder/rape/theft cannot be, I don't think I can quite file it under "IMMORAL.That's a paddlin" but I think it's fair to say that regular casual-sex-havers are probably not who we want to model all of society on and should be viewed as a sort of 1970s swingers kind of eccentric or outcast.
100ProofTollBooth
9mo ago
"...contribute significantly to the rural character..."
"...the stewardship many feel for their communities."
This reads like the preamble to some hardcore NIMBY organizations' charter. Amorphous phrases that point to "character", "community" and (unelected) "stewardship" don't trump personal property rights. They're not even in the same neighborhood.
And when is the "character" of a place set in stone? This is straight up No True Scotsman 101. This is such a literal trope the Simpson have a hallmark episode about it. The only constant is change and no person or group gets to self-appoint as "arbiter of the good character of a place and community." That's a well paved road to localized authoritarianism.
I definitely code traditionalist conservative, but trampling on individual and property rights "to make sure we keep the Main Street Habdashery up for another 100 years" is the same as when progressives want to outlaw parental choice in schools so that "we can end bigotry forever by forcing Ibram X. Kendi book reports."
100ProofTollBooth
9mo ago
Because it's in the Sunday thread, I'll use a fun low stakes response.
There was a time in the early to mid 2010s where male grooming accidentally looped around both sides of the culture war. On the right, dudes started growing out beards because of the military special operations affiliation (SEALs etc. famously get to ignore grooming standards and push to an extreme.) I think this also coincided with a wave of Viking-related media which roughly coded right. Simultaneously, on the left, beards started being used to signal a sort of neo-hippy/bohemian/burning man/tech bro vibe. Guilfoyle in Silicon Valley leaned into this. Chunky dudes into Craft Beer and board games really took it far.
(un?)fortunately other fashion and grooming signals usually reduced the ambiguity. Right coded dudes often had the undercut haircut to go with the beard and wore the various tactical-inspired clothing styles (fitted polos, earth tone sneakers / boots). Left coded dudes would have band teeshirts, lots of flannel, flat brims, ear gauges. You could usually figure it out pretty easily.
But I'll always enjoy the time I watched an actual beardy-military dude and a very in shape rock climber exchange 90 minutes of workout advice and hiking / climbing stories, only to have Mr.SEAL go "Dude, where do you hunt?" and the Vegan Boulder stare him dead in the face and go "I would never hurt a living thing."
"I do not" at weddings probably has a less awkward silence.
100ProofTollBooth
9mo ago
Social work instead of policing is a false premise to begin with. They aren't substitutes - that's the point and the whole problem.
Policing is about addressing (swiftly) and preventing (through disciplined proactive action) violent or otherwise extremely damaging anti-social behavior. It's very immediate and constant. Social work is more oriented proactive and cooperative skill building and promoting pro-social behaviors.
A good analogy is to use the cousins of Police, firefighters. Firefighters (putting aside their EMT roles for a moment) is about stopping a fire immediately and quickly (hoses etc.) Additionally, fire departments have to proactively prevent fires by requiring buildings to be up to code. The whole point is about stopping fires, not about building new buildings or fixing up older ones that just need a little paint and spackle.
If you run over to me and go "oh my god, my house is on fire!" and my first response is "Well, let's pick up the trash in your yard, repaint the walls, and plant some new trees!" You're going to be furious. That is exactly, however, the argument for "social workers instead of cops."
100ProofTollBooth
9mo ago
Mostly concur, but would like to add a dose of your own (well stated!) nuance.
I don't like the bright line distinction between "legal" drug and "illegal drug." The fact of the matter is that while it is easy to say "hey, if we all just use drugs safely and don't put ourselves in the position to harm others, we can legalize all but the most chemically addictive / mind altering," there is going to he a HUGE percentage of the population that just can't adhere to those guardrails and, worse, will cause disproportionate negative impact to the rest of society. It can't just be 0-or-100 legal versus illegal for substances. I much prefer the illegal-decriminalized-legal spectrum, as well as penalties on associated behaviors.
The best example is alcohol. If I'm hammered inside of a bar (legal) and then go outside, I'm now drunk in public. This is anywhere from a fine to misdemeanor offense in most jurisdictions but, most importantly, is often not aggressively enforced. It's used as an automatic gotcha when someone who is technically drunk in public starts engaging in antisocial behavior; accosting passers by, opening urinating / defecating, dangerous pedestrian conduct around traffic etc. For most people who just sort of stumble home - even if they're truly wasted - they probably won't catch the charge.
So, for substances like weed, psychedelics, MDMA, I'd like to see something similar and heavily tilted towards fines instead of "on your permanent record!" charges. Let's say you take some mushrooms and stare at your hand in the park for hours. Cool, guy. Have fun. But if you take a bunch of mushrooms and run around naked and shouting, I'd like to see not only the disorderly conduct charge, but also something along the lines of "psychedlic safety fine." This goes towards sending a signal - and imposing a real material cost - that might modulate the behavior of marginal users (hardcore addicts / abusers is a different story and I acknowledge that ... as should we all). If you're on the borderline between problem usage and harmless recreation fun, I really want there to be a feedback loop for you to conclude, "every time I take mushrooms, I get a ticket, a summons, and it costs be $300 extra bucks. I can't keep afford to act this way.)
I haven't totally thought through the second order effects of these ideas, so if I've missed an obvious anti-pattern, I'll wipe the egg off my face.
100ProofTollBooth
9mo ago
You are correct and I agree.
The image or function I had in my head was the 1-for-1 swapping of police for social work. That's what led to my lead-off assertion. Police certainly do de facto social work and I wouldn't call that a blatant misuse of them as a civic resource.
I also enjoy your point that the larger criminal justice system is often dysfunctional and can lead to good deeds going punished. A police might recommend to the DA that little timmy not be thrown in jail, but that same DA is facing a tough reelection in a "tough on crime" jurisdiction and throws the book at little timmy. Flip it around and you have what literally happened in Baltimore over the past several years where the DA declined to prosecute illegal firearms charges (with solid evidence) because of .... something.
I guess that's a good angle to consider. If we did flood the streets with social workers, how would that alter the criminal justice system of them? Would DAs bemoan the lack of casework coming their way? Would Cops only do the paperwork on the really violent crimes and let the middle-ground stuff (theft, possession with intent) just go into the ether? Pondering @Ponder's comment.
I can't help but point out that a mid 2010s term in Red Pill online communities was "monk mode." The idea being that a self-improving man abstain from all hedonistic pleasures (sex,porn,masturbation,alcohol,other drugs) and exclusively pursue career/school, physical training (mostly lifting), and intellectual development. Unfortunately, what passed for "intellectual development" was as simple as listening to Jock Wilinck's podcast and reading the easier modern translations of Meditations. But, I digress. The deeper point to "monk mode" was putting mental distance between yourself and the Object of Desire (women, in this, and most, cases). Although the science behind so-called dopamine detoxes isn't really there, the mental concept is still useful enough. Stop over-stimulating your reward pathways, and a more level headed thinking should reemerge.
I don't think monastic life should be looked at as a decision to leave the sexual rat race. After watching the documentary The Holy Mountain Edit: Athos (thanks to a commenter for pointing this out!) I became far more convinced that monks who go monastic and stick with it are totally committed to growing closer to God and are willing to endure what is a brutal existence to do that. Watch the film, these guys are living in what looks like working poverty and often reflect on loneliness, doubt, depression, existential crisis. The myth of being a happy monk contentedly brewing beer with your homies covers up what is a life of constant spiritual work. Dealing with the sexual marketplace can't be anywhere near the center of that way of living.
The modern monkish retreat is what is now endemic to young, single western men; porn and substance abuse. The quickest path to satiating a need is satiating it with cheap and freely available goods no matter how short lasting (if the price is sufficiently low). With an internet connection, porn is unlimited and free forever. It may be the cheapest of cheap carbs in terms of mental sustenance, but the price is right. Pair that with an anything-but-minimum-wage job and you can afford beer and or weed. Once you cross about a $50k annual income, you can upgrade that to liquor, sports betting, and impulse buy video games. Consumer culture doesn't lead to meaning, but it can prevent acute personal despair (at least, I think, in a bell-curve majority of specifically men. I don't know about women, but that's for another post).
As far as dealing with and dating modern western woman, the internet is full of resources on how to succeed there. I'd caution that a lot of is written without any concern for classic ethics and morals as well as pro-social behavior at a societal level. If you want to get yours you can learn to do that. If you start to put a high value on pro-social behavior and believe in the traditional conservative case for strong families, you can get to a new level. You start to see overtly sexual displays not as turn offs because, as you pointed out, they hit the male lizard brain full force, but as dangerous or suspicious. I think an interesting and hopefully benign comparison is that of a lava flow - it looks cool as hell, but you don't really want to get closer than a half mile to it.
Many other mottizens have made great contributions to commentary on the sexual revolution and sexual liberalism since the 1960s. My only addition there is that carnal consumption is like any other consumption; we've grown into a society that permits and even flirts with glorifying gluttony. Food, sex, substances, instant gratification purchases, gratuitous "experience" spending, even over consumption of cheap digital goods (doomscrolling) all come with a cost. Fortunately, the individual doesn't need anything from society to practice moderation. It's up the individual to reframe what he or she may see as "abundance I don't have" to "gluttony I don't want."
100ProofTollBooth
8mo ago
Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less.
Exactly. And this is why you have TRP and Andrew Tate's of the world. "Accept less and be, ya know, sorta happier maybe?" is the worst sales pitch of all time. Pop Culture feminism right now itself charges hard into the opposite direction; "girlboss", "lean in", "yass queen slay" (jeez, it hurt typing that last one).
In a hyper individualized society, "accepting less" is capitulation and fundamental surrender. Interestingly enough, I think you're seeing that with the > 50% of sexless, directionless men and the (literal) flavor-of-the-week "#lazygirl" meme. In a pro-social society with an clear emphasis on family, "accept less" is transformed into "team up with someone else for the long haul and do better than you could on your own." This also benefits from the fact that it's true for at least 80% of the population - post industrialized society or not. The mistake of 3rd wave+ feminism - and I do think it was a mistake, not a deliberate conspiratorial lie - was equating all of male history to the history of top 20% of males and then advocating for individual female choices that aligned to that model of human behavior.
Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.
What social cues and reinforcement loops exist today that encourage this over "get money, get laid"? What's more, it takes two to tango; what place does "derive meaning for raising children" have in popular culture for young women today?
Finally, the power imbalance between a man and the state has never been higher. I can derive meaning from raising my family, but I also have to live in constant fear that a judge can order, without me being present or informed, that I not be allowed to go to my house for at least two weeks, with a high probability I am going to have a challenge to my custody rights. When a man can have his family taken away at any moment by the bureaucratic machine of the state (based on "antiquated" deference to the fragility of a woman, right?) then investing my sense of transcendental meaning into the family seems high risk.
You bring up a good point about the convergence of earnings in a post-industrial society where physical strength means far, far less. I happen to think that's a very good thing. What we've failed to reconcile, however, is how the state has both (a) failed to evolve to account for this and (b) has over-evolved to take the place of provider - often with horrible real consequences for those in specifically aims to support
Emba places the family at the center of her "new" definition of masculinity. But, I would argue, there's been a massive assault on the family unit since the 1960s that has made the goal of family formation high risk and unlikely for men of all income levels. "Please base your own conception of masculinity on an institution that is actively under assault." Hmmm, I'm no Trojan, but I think I see a horse.
100ProofTollBooth
8mo ago
"Which is more important in an internal combustion engine? Oxygen or the flammable substance?"
It's diet and exercise. You have to have both. Together.
These pills won't make people healthier. They will make people feel better about themselves. They aren't weight loss drugs, they're NextGen antidepressants. Metabolic syndrome often does not present as visible obesity. Major stomach and liver issues can go undetected for years. People will start taking these drugs and remain at a lower body weight. Then, one day, they die suddenly and any autopsy performed with reveal superfluous amounts of visceral fat, a leaking stomach, and a liver close to non-function.
Physical fitness is, among many other things, an information feedback loop. If you are in bad shape, you have been making poor health decisions. Sometimes, this can be unavoidable (late nights during crunch time at work or school, what have you). But, mostly, it's a clear indication that you're making poor, poor choices. Using something that covers up the effects of these choices does nothing to alter that decision process. I'd wager that habitual users of Wegovy etc. probably will also habitually (ab)use other substances - alcohol, narcotics, sugar, social media. This is not a road to health.
100ProofTollBooth
8mo ago
Anyone should be able to start a government-owned businesses to allow some choices for consumers while still guaranteeing workers the value of their labor.
- How do you start something you don't own? This is not intended to be a snarky question. Like, what are the mechanics of starting a government-owned business? Is it like getting a drivers license?
- How do government-owned businesses go out of business? If they continually run at a negative cashflow, is there a shutdown procedure? Who runs this?
- How are their finances managed? Do they get to complement their revenue with taxpayer money a la the current budgeting cycle?
- Who hires additional workers into these government-owned firms? The "starter" of the business (from question 1) or the government?
100ProofTollBooth
8mo ago
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town
What if the town council disagrees with my idea? Am I not allowed to start the business?
Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town.
Who does the hiring at the plant? Me, the "founder" or the town council?
I agree with the point regarding "limited life experience outside of the realm of intellectuality." Let me expand on it.
I've written about this before (too lazy atm to link to it), however, colleges are over-specializing to the detriment of their students. Many (most?) of the pre-WW2 male literary giants had little-to-no college education. They wrote about their experiences and honed the craft of writing via journalistic or similar assignments. Hemingway's terse prose owes a lot to his career as a newspaperman.
Post-war literary, high-brow writers (Updike, Roth, Mailer, etc.) may have had more formal and complete college education, often as English majors. Again, however, they usually wrote for school papers, or maybe tried to submit to a popular magazine. (This is an interesting subplot in an early season of Mad Men).
I'd say starting from the time of the so-called "Literary Brat Pack" (Brett Easton Ellis and his ilk), you have a whole class of "writers" who go to very prestigious sounding colleges in the Northeast take creative writing (not English) classes, and basically brute force a publication maybe through an undergrad literary magazine. Then, with the help of a professor, they immediately get into an MFA program (U. Iowa helps the most!) where they can write - and just maybe publish - for years on end. If that novel doesn't hit, they can get a job as a professor and one of the fancier mid Western liberal arts colleges and get some long form piece published in an online only magazine once a year.
The point is that, much like even the hard sciences, the over-institutionalization of writing has made it brittle. You have "writers" who are writing exclusively for a tiny subset of other writers with the right pedigrees. When you know everyone by name in your market, all of a sudden social/political orthodoxy Trumps actual talent and ability and also constrains real artistic risk taking. Hence, you get so many self-indulgent think piece novels about how hard some rich kid's life is. There's literally one called All The Sad Young Literary Men by the brother of Masha Gessen. He went to Harvard and then got an MFA from Syracuse and now teachers at Columbia's Journalist school. You can't make this shit up.
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