100ProofTollBooth
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Selecting "role models" from within the system just continues the current system. The flavors change like all seasonal consumer goods.
I've written before about the cartoonish man-boy masculinity in current marketing. (I mean, Jesus, they literally have a boy with a beard in the first 20 seconds of the clip. This is what the marketers think of you). What is marketed and allowed is a no-consequence, no-potency masculinity that's safe and fun for all ages. There are uncountable YouTube clips that draw the obvious parallel between a boy at toy shop and a Dad at Home Depot / Fleet Farm. Adult manhood in the west is a cute "awww, look at them play!" trope.
Even within the current system, you hear complaint about prolonged boyhood and doughy soft man boys. SNL keeps almost pointing at it. For the greatest example; Seth Rogen's entire existence and career. In fact, this is also where clowns like Tate fall short. Tate was a kickboxer - not a soldier. His "manly" development was in a tightly controlled professional sport. I will always remember the time when I got into a scuffle with a fraternity brother who was a Division-1 Wrestler. He handily stomped my drunk ass but I was surprised to see him obviously shaken up after the fight. In our drunken bro-hug reconciliation, he let me know that "that was the first time I've been in a fight, man!"
I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated.
Through the 20th century, the transition I'm talking about was when boys banded together for a hunt or tribal level military service. Consequences were real, people got hurt, women weren't only not "allowed" - it would've been actively detrimental to have them involved. Thus, you also had real and meaningful identification of a fundamentally male activity (hunting / war). While that no longer exists, women still absolutely have their sacred capability and activity; motherhood (or, at least, the ability to be a mother even if not chosen). (For a different post, but I also think that moterhood is under systemic attack as well.)
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
In short - I just don't have any good ideas for this one, but I know it's a massive problem.
Until we figure out that idea, modern secular man will be one version or another of perma-boyhood --- the "giggling at my own farts" of Seth Rogen or the "pussy and punching" paper Tiger of Andrew Tate.
Quick side note: I believe there are viable traditional religious solutions to this (surprise!) but those simply aren't broadly implementable without sprinting towards a theocracy.
100ProofTollBooth
3mo ago
I can't remember who said this, I think it may have been one of the podcast bro's back in 2016, but part of Trump's attractiveness - as a born-into-wealth billionaire - to working class people is that he looks, sounds, and acts like they think they would if they were billionaires.
- He has a big plane with his name on it
- He
boughtmarried an exotic european supermodel - His business books are all about "hard nosed deal making" instead of .... EBITDA and capital structure leverage
- He had a big TV show about ... business-ing!
- Red ties and gold stuff everywhere
- He owns the golf course. He can probably, like, get beers brought to him!
- His sense of humor isn't a dry and acerbic wit (William F. Buckley, looking at you), it's name calling and the kind of cool kid in-group bullying you'd see from High School preps and jocks (which he is.)
This feeds into a comfortable narrative for working class southerners and midwesterners. Sure, he's a plutocrat, but, unlike Mitt Romney, I can envision him tearing into a Big Mac because I have seen him tear into a big mac a bunch of times.
One thing to point out: Trump gladly and gleefully wears MAGA ballcaps a lot. In $5000 suits. And it somehow looks ... normal? Most other politicians would never make the fashion faux pas of mixing a ballcap with a suit and, even if they did for some sort of folksy photo-op, it would seem about as natural as Hillary's southern drawl. Trump thinks his MAGA ballcap looks fucking awesome and so wears it with confidence, arrogance, and pinache. Double for the dick-length red ties.
Trump is, in fact, a real estate huckster. And if you're a working class dude or chick, you know a lot of real estate hucksters, or used car salesmen, or plumbers who do bad work and overcharge, or house painters who use lead paint still, or an electrician who's been electrocuted on more jobs than he hasn't...you're probably related to one or more of these people. So, Trump Is. Your. Guy.
(Side note: This is why Ramaswamay failed. He may be just as much of a huckster as DJT, but ... a biotech huckster? Not going to work)
100ProofTollBooth
3mo ago
(Mixed rant / actual CW post. I defer to the Delphic wisdom of the mods to discern this)
New book by Blake Butler out.
What caught my eye was the uncharacteristically vitriolic nature of Tyler Cowen's post. He flatly states "I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book." That's the culture war angle which I invite comments on. It produced some thoughts regarding household privacy which I hadn't thought of before. Would there be progress across all of the trans/COVID restrictions/guns/abortion issues if we frame it as "just don't talk about some stuff and we're all fine."
But on to the semi-rant part.
It seems like both Butler and his wife are people supremely in touch with the importance of their own emotions and, even worse, their own perspectives of their own emotions. It really does seem like the unending continuation of a sophomore's first late-night dorm room pseudo-philosophy discussion. "But like, I feel like ... I kind of ... get it, man."
Take this from the review:
She is a ferociously hard worker, committed to her writing and her teaching (she is a professor of creative writing), and also to baking—an art, like poetry, that depends on precision. She loves philosophy and nature, Melville, Cocteau, the Detroit Pistons, and “The Office.” He is touched by her fragility, her willingness to expose herself to him. “Love someone back. / You just begin,” she writes in her poem “Hopes Up,” and, eventually, he takes her advice.
Philosophy. Nature. Baking. The Office(!). And two sentence platitude poetry. Forgive me if I'm not with "it" or, even worse, if, like Abe Simpson, I don't even know what "it" is anymore, but this seems like almost a parody of a bad basic b*tch dating profile. I wonder, would she have described herself as "quirky." I'll quickly chastise myself here for disrespecting someone who has taken her own life. Let's move to a deeper question.
From all accounts, Molly, Butler's wife, seemed to be a deeply troubled person who allowed her mental health issues to fester to such an extent that she behaved extremely poorly. True emotional spousal abuse, almost gleeful infidelity before and during marriage, and some questionable professional-personal decisions. Yet all of it seems to have been hand-waved away through a self-serving belief in some sort of deeper understanding of "the human condition." I remember thinking something similar when reading Christopher Hitchens on his own drinking. Hitch was a raging alcoholic, and he knew this. When he wrote about it, however...
I work at home, where there is indeed a bar-room, and can suit myself.… At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there.
Oh, ho ho! What a card! Yes, he's sauced beyond belief, but have you seen his turn of phrase?.
It's a simple assertion; no amount of genius - real, imagined, or self-perceived - excuses you from being degenerate, abusive, socially irresponsible, or actively antagonistic. My worry is that Mr. Butler and his late wife were constantly so self-absorbed that they used a mix of literary romance, hyper-rationalization, and substance abuse to avoid engaging with a very normal, good, and productive feeling: guilt.
I've written before about how modern society ripped away traditional male gender toles and how that could be good, bad, or a mix. That's beside the point. The point is that it failed to produce any sort of replacement. It's a void and we're seeing the fruits of that.
In terms of guilt, a movement away from traditional religion may be good, bad, or mixed, but there's been no secular alternative. The Catholic church has a very prescriptive system and process for the sin-guilt-penance feedback loop[^1] I do not see the same in the modern secular culture. In fact, I see the opposite. The pop-psych concept of "self care" appears, to me, to be a blank check for instant and unequivocal absolution from responsibility. Did you sleep with a bunch of your spouse's friends, randos, and some of your own students? Do you have a drinking problem that's causing you to fail in your high trust relationships? Do you use social media as a social weapon? - take some time to understand your own trauma and experience. Where's the part about going "holy shit, I fucked up bad here and need to say sorry."?
This all ties up to a larger theory that modern and postmodern culture does two things that are mutually reinforcing in a downward spiral. (1) Emphasize the individual above all else (even the immediate family) and (2) Remove traditional social structures, expectations, and rituals and replace them with nothing so that the only refuge is deeper back into hyper-individualism. Sprinkle in our du jour oppression narratives and class struggle and you've got the perfect recipe for a level of personal-self deception that leads, ultimately, to self-destruction; suicide, in Molly's case.[^2]
Nature abhors a vacuum (I can use that cliche because I'm a bad writer who can't get published). It follows that those going around in their Hoover Uniforms and actually creating vacuums are truly deplorable.
[^1]: I know this religion the best, which is why I named dropped it. My assumption is that the other Abrahamics, at least, have something similar. [^2]: Caveat that I am not wholly blaming modern culture for causing Molly's mental illness, but I am saying it probably abetted its growth and the lady's ultimate demise.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Quality post. I don't have any factual or analytical quarrels, just a different point of view based on experienced-influenced shifts in value prioritization.
I once had a 90 minute each way commute for about a year. That's 3 hours in the car Monday to Friday. I hated it. Traffic is a stress machine; you have to be vigilant constantly in what is a boring situation with high stakes (even a fender bender has long term impact on your insurance premiums, what if the other guy doesn't have insurance, wear and tear on your car compounds, etc.) Especially on the drive home, I would get back feeling far more drained than I anticipated and this would sap my energy and motivation to do much more than sloppily prepare a Bro Dude dinner and veg out in front of the T.V.
For most of my career after that (even pre-COVID) I had either sub 30-minute public transit commutes, or a healthy mix of WFH mixed with 1 - 2 times weekly sub-30 minute driving commutes.
Without an ounce of doubt, the public transit experience was worse than every other mode including 3 hours daily. This is because it makes you tired and weary of people.
In any major American urban city with public transit, for going on close to a decade, daily riders are confronted with antisocial behaviors ranging from the mild yet still inexplicably annoying (those folks who play music on speaker instead of using headphones) to the low level criminal (open drug use or exchange ... panhandling) to the worrisome (erratic enough behavior that you must become vigilant in anticipation of potential threat) to the just .... disheartening (fare evasion by someone who obviously could pay it but understands "hey, no one is going to stop me" is now a policy in many cities). The compounding effect is that you have a constant availability bias. I can remind myself all I want about bad mental models and cognitive biases, but if I saw another homeless dude taking a shit on the platfrom this morning, I'm probably tipping a little lighter, I'm probably scoffing a little harder at a "therapy instead of jail" article in the Atlantic.
The "public space" is only public insofar as there's an understood order and general preservation of the space by the public. Otherwise ... it's a No Man's Land with a random free-ride-machine punching through it. There has to be some sort of collective respect and even pride in the thing itself. Public transit should be more than a competitor to private cars, more than a utilitarian cost-per-mile exercise. A ride should be considered part of the experience of that locale, that city, that city's culture. But ... if the current lowest comment denominator of that city's culture is open air drug market / improvisational lavatory / au-plain-aire insane asylum / literal free rider problem Illustrated ... then that public space and that public good (the transit system) is no longer what I would call capital P Public. It's a state run shitty service through Thomas Hobbes' human ant farm.
I'll let the wonderful Mottizens debate specific policy, but I'll die on the hill of this larger point - public spaces without genuine daily public support (in the form of prosocial behavior) and an understood order of things become lawless lands. It is the job of Government to reasonably encourage the prosocial behaviors (posters and the like) ... and decisively enforce actual law breaking. I do not understand how any public servant, especially elected ones, can look at fare evasion and go "oh well. It's not like they're killing anyone!" No, I suppose they aren't stabbing Cash App cofounders to death (oh wait .... sorry, too soon?). The suicide of citizen cohesion is done in slow motion and one cut at a time.
100ProofTollBooth
5mo ago
I've been following this, and it's US Military cousin, for years.
In fact, we've a fresh article on it.
There are two groups of analysis here; individual performance and unit culture.
On individual performance, female combat soldiers, at the median, are far, far worse than their male counterparts. This is to the surprise of no one. In the general population, bone density, upper body strength, and grip strength don't overlap more than 1- 2 % (meaning the bottom 1-2% of males with the top 1-2% of females). Even if a female is very motivated and hits the gym, the amount of room she has to make up is nigh on impossible.
Where this gets compounded is over time and with compounding adversity. What I mean here is that a Superwoman might be able to pass things the a PFT (physical fitness test), marksmanship test, and things like obstacle courses and land nav over a single day on a U.S. base. In the field (and field exercises) however, the compounding of sleep deprivation and multiple days of moving combat loads and speed catches up. I couldn't find the article with quick Googling (I might later), but there was a report in the 2018 range of female US Marines admitting "we can hump the weight of a combat load for a long time, but we just can't move as fast from objective to objective." There's a saying in the SOF community that "selection is everyday." Just because you passed the test that first time and became an infantryman / ranger / SEAL / etc. doesn't mean that you're automatically a super solider for life. You have to work everyday and you have to perform everyday. In Ranger Battalion in the U.S. Army, there's something called RFS or Released For Standards. This means that you get kicked out for not being good enough in one way or another. Often times its leadership related (to keep guys from just making rank by hanging out forever) but it also isn't uncommon for a Ranger to all of a sudden fuck up a PFT because they had been slacking off and drinking every weekend. Back to Superwoman - she might be able to get through an indoc and selection, but I would put the odds of her maintaining those standards in a unit over time to be effectively zero.
Unit culture is the next layer. Every person in a unit is a mix of talents. One guy is a really great shot, and kind of OK at PT. Another guy is a PT stud, but isn't so great at land nav. The unit commander (say at the platoon level) is above average at PT and shooting, but isn't an all around badass, but he does get a bunch of gucci gear because he knows how to do acquisition voodoo. A female (especially enlisted) will, probably, be at the bottom of all of these categories. Her treatment will be no different than a male who is at the bottom of all of those categories; "you're last on the run, you can't shoot straight, you fell asleep on patrol, you can't carry the 240B with a full complement of ammo." It singles you out for extra ridicule and scrutiny. Sure, you're passing all of the minimums and standards, but you aren't great or even good at any one thing. It means the unit has to plan contingency around you always instead of slotting you into things you're good at to compensate for the things you're worse at.
I'll leave it there for now because I think those are the two main and enduring cases against women in combat. There are some edge things that also raise questions; what happens when (and it will happen) a female gets pregnant in combat? Will females potentially use sex to curry favor from peers and superiors (of course not, it's a professional force! that would never happen.
As far as Israeli female combat soldiers go; First, the definition of "combat" is a little stretched. Border guards are one thing (as are pilots), but a maneuver unit (infantry, armor, artillery) is another. Second, the Israeli model is still built heavily on conscripts and reservists supporting the active duty while not being anywhere near the latter's standards. I think the unfortunately reality is that many female Israeli "combat" soldiers didn't quite get into combat by choice.
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
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
1yr ago
Something to be aware of is that as much as we are in an AI hype cycle for new products, we're also in an AI-safety charlatanism hype cycle. In exploring organizations like the Future of Life Institute, I've come across links and associations to non-profits and other advocacy groups, at least in the U.S., that have legislative goals in regards to AI. Most of the goals sound plausibly good; "let's prevent the creation of the paperclip machine that destroys earth." Some are obvious DEI backdoors (the key term to look for here is "algorithmic bias"). Even that's fine as it's just existing culture war conflict.
What bothers me is the number of people in these organizations that have absolutely zero technical background or capability. I mean literally none - they've never even dabbled with some basic python libraries that make training and running a model a 3 line endeavor. They never took anything beyond single variable calculus. They have zero stat and probability background and so fall for BASIC statistical fallacies over and over again. Even beyond the hard math and comp sci subjects, a lot haven't taken the time to investigate what I think are the two philosophical domains most important to curret LMMs and "baby" AIs; epistemology and linguistics.
Previously, I would chuckle and think, "sure! make your policy recommendations. You have no idea what you're talking about anyway." What I'm seeing now, however, is a lot of a desire to build a bureaucracy of "experts" to endorse politically pre-approved measures. This is the CDC during COVID.
I don't want to send the message that only hardcore ML engineers can have opinions on AI. Most of my career has been spent working with engineers, so I know that they are no less victim to poor / motivated / emotional reasoning than any other demographic and they often have trouble explaining the concepts they are demonstrated experts in.
The only solid cautionary advice I think I can offer in this case is to be suspicious of any group which presents a too-pure benevolent mission (i.e. "our mission is to make the world a better place for everyone always and forever), is alarmist in their doom-saying ("we have to act NOW!"), yet recommends unspecific remedies ("we need to develop mechanisms of ensuring collaboration and the integration of multiple viewpoints ... for safety ... and, like, follow the science).
100ProofTollBooth
7d ago
QuantumFreakonomics's comment did the most to influence my thinking. The car analogy is a good one to ponder.
Implement of mayhem aside, the issue of concern in my book is another small step forward to "lock up the crazies fast" but now expanding to the indirectly crazy - the parents.
Ever since the Virginia Tech shooting (possibly earlier) a steady mid-brow point has been "people with, ya know, really bad mental health problems, shouldn't have firearms ... and maybe knives ... cars could be bad too ... maybe we should commit them." The obvious slippery slope there is (a) There are plenty of well adjusted people who have mental health histories - what's to stop the state from arbitrarily deciding they are now a threat and (b) The obvious market adjustment that those with new mental health problems will simply conceal them and not seek help because of the risk of deprivation of basic rights. Where this gets especially dystopian is when known associates of any individual start to use "hey, you know he/she is really crazy right!" in vindictive personal lawfare. The best existing example of this is the weaponization of mutual restraining orders in divorce proceedings to try and secure an advantage in custody. I can see an easy early version of this in parents who, exasperated with a rebellious child, decide to inform "the authorities" that their angsty teen is, in fact, super coconuts and should be sent to one of those padded wall spots (while Mom and Dad enjoy some childless stay-cation time).
With this case, the message has been sent to parents of "troubled teens" that they might want to consider severely restricting their child's access to myriad things/activities/privacy/independence and, perhaps, even to begin involving "counselors" and other semi-state apparatchiks all to avoid personal liability in the event something drastic happens.
OR
The message has been sent to parents to not at all engage with their child's problems, and essentially hope they go away. But its important to maintain that plausible ignorance - again - to avoid personal culpability.
Being shitty parents has to absolutely remain 100% legal. If it becomes illegal to be a bad mom or dad, we're directly on the road to State-As-Parent, the elimination of privacy, and the enforcement of current political majoritarian monoculture at the nuclear family level.
100ProofTollBooth
4mo ago
Ross Douthat on South Korea's abysmal fertility rates.
It's a direct warning to the United Sates; Douthat concludes with "So the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us." I think it's worth separating and then reintegrating a few of the items that Douthat brings up in the context of some recent Motte threads on both immigration and the sexual revolution. I'll add some of my own new comments on religion.
First, on the sexual revolution specific to the South Korean context. South Korean women enjoyed the same kind of personal "liberation" that women did and the pill, as it did everywhere, removed the very real possibility of pregnancy from sex. The conservative traditions of the South Korean monoculture, however, remained mostly in place so there was no summer of love and significantly less tolerance, even today, for loud-and-proud promiscuity. As Douthat writes, pregnancy outside of wedlock in South Korea is extremely rare. Alright, so South Koreans aren't orgy-ing it up, but they still get married and start families?
No, they don't. (Note: this article goes into more depth on everything that Douthat's op-ed covers).
In short, being married in South Korea seems like it sucks. There's such an emphasis on child success (in the purely credentialist sense; grades, prestigious school attendance etc.) paired with a brutal "work hard for the sake of working hard" career culture that South Korea parents, apparently, never have time to have fun or relax. What's more, they aren't really raising their children in any sort of tailored or individual way - there's a signal success criteria, and the mission is push the kid as far as they can go within that criteria. Child are a prestige project. Even worse, the filial culture also means that children are expected to be utterly obedient to their parents without question. It would seem that a very likely scenario playing out in many South Korean homes is parents ordering their children to do homework that they (the children) have no interest in while the parents would rather do something fun with the kids, and neither party can actually admit to that mutual preference, so they both continue with the drudgery. It's a weird backwards Prisoners Dilemma where both prisoners admit to a crime they both didn't commit and explicitly ask for the maximum sentence.
All of this has lead, unsurprisingly, to a fertility crisis that could be demographically more damaging than the Black Death (caveat: with straight line projections and no intervention or policy shifts. See Douthat article). The obvious option of throwing open the floodgates to immigrants is an utter non-starter in the context of South Korean monoculture and, with the live fire exercise mass immigration into Europe, probably also unlikely to receive support from "pragmatic" policy makers.
As the linked articles describe, the Government is trying to match-make its own citizens and in the South Korean culture wars you have extremist MGTOW style groups for both women and men. Oh, and the North Koreans are still a credible invasion threat and the SK military may run out of men. Super.
Douthat's article gives it only one sentence of attention, but I think a big item of importance here is that South Korea isn't a "religious" society in the Western sense. Its social and cultural mores are most heavily influenced by filial devotion and family-ethno-cultural tradition in a secular context. I wonder if that is part of the root cause of the problem.
Raising children has always been difficult. When you exist with a personal belief that having children is an order from God for most (but not all) people, you can get through much of the difficulties of child rearing, perhaps multiple times. I'm reminded of a recent interview with Jensen Huang, co-founder of nVIDIA, where he stated that, knowing what he does now, he probably wouldn't start a start-up again. This is because it's just too damn taxing. He went on to say that one of the major advantages of first time founders is that they don't know how insanely hard it's all going to be and they often operate with an insanely highly level of personal belief in their success and a lack of knowledge of the difficulty reality. I think anyone who's been around first time parents (before birth) sees a similar hyper-optimism.
That South Korean's culturally lack a transcendental, faith based backing for having children seems, to me, to be a deeper and distinctive cause of the fertility crisis there. (Distinctive in that there are also conditions present in SK that obviously correlate to low fertility, but those conditions are present in other societies with low fertility as well, not least of which is rapid economic growth and very high levels of basic education and standard of living). If you don't have "Master of the Universe says so" pressure mixed with "but Master of the Universe will help me out!" optimism, I don't see gaggles of South Korea children streaming through the streets.
Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.
I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.
I categorically reject literal cellular biological modification when we have already developed, employed, and enjoyed a social, cultural, and legal mechanism to address the problem. Namely; monogamous marriage.
Societies have a funny way of coming out about 50/50 men and women. It's almost like the species wants to remain capable of replication and self-propagation. Evolution be like that. In fact, as your posts points out, when you mess around with that rough 50/50 ratio, things get bad. China today is an excellent example. In Post WW2 Russia / Soviet states, the insane loss of men created similar odd circumstances.
I wholeheartedly agree that lonely, sexless young men can easily turn violent and up end communities if not societies as a whole. But the answer there is to give them a progressing (not progressive) life narrative, roughly; learn, work, serve, get married, raise children, die with dignity. Society then backs this up by demonstrating and exalting the value of this life pattern. This, however, is what the sexual revolution dismantled in the 1960s. It replaced it with .... nothing.
Edit: Societies the world over have also, rightly, prioritized dealing with male aggression because that leads to murder, rape, and injury. What we're seeing with the destruction of the family paired with female economic self-sufficiency is female aggression. It's far less overt than its male counterpart and doesn't result in immediate massive physical harm. Yet, it does exist and it can still have massive societal negative effects. Dealing with it is hard. Women shouldn't go to jail for cheating or leading men on or playing gossip and indirect power games. The historical solution was very harsh social pressure - look up what they did to scolds in puritan New England. Hell, despite the very online attitudes against "slut shaming," the median western woman still uses sexualized gossip to malign her opponents. I'm not going to say I'm in favor of institutionalized mean girl-ism. That's ridiculous. I put my faith (literally) in social conventions, however, that have much more rigid guidelines for both inter and intra sex relationships up to and including marriage. Choose-your-own sexual and social norms create ambiguity, uncertainty, anxiety, and neuroticism. Does this sound like your median Millenial single person and married couple? Don't even start with Gen-Z who have all managed to hyper neruoticiziezize themselves into digital multi-personas paired with real world hermeticism.
I've said this more than a few times on the Motte; I'm not out to paint 1950s American suburban marriage as the idyllic to end all idyllics. There were real problems. But since the destruction of the nuclear family began, there has simply been no meaningful alternative. It's a boundary-less personal "freedom" out to infinity. Phrased differently; it's nihilism. Hedonic nihilism, but nihilism none the less.
I think your "modify genes at the species level" theory is, at best, a techno-liberal solution (to a problem that was previously addressed) with a whole host of side-effects and just the teeniest little bit of lace between itself and eugenics. At worst, it's full bore eugenics with a side dish of state sponsored misandry.
100ProofTollBooth
3mo ago
Sorry to hijack a little.
One of the miracles of my life was becoming aware that I was a weird nerd at the end of High School, realizing it was a life sentence of neurosis, and very deliberately Chad-ing it up in college (Frat, did a sport). Fuck "be true to yourself" nonsense. I had leaned into maladaptive behavior for all of my adolescence and it didn't make me feel good. So, I changed it.
What's jarring to me in professional life now is seeing people who did something similar (albeit with maybe less conscious direction) flip their persona like a light switch based on the immediate social context. Product Managers in Big Tech, generally speaking, are much, much more likely to be MBA Chad/Stacey types. Yet, the second they don't get their way or face some sort of adverse group dynamic, they start sperging out with statements like "I know I don't "get it" like all of you do, I'm just trying to do my best here with what's a really awkward situation for me!" Contrast this with one of the better PMs I've ever worked with - a literal ex college football quarterback - who would often wrap up meetings with "Cool, cool! Computer dudes get after it!" And they would. Happily. Because he was being honest.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Pedantic answer: Only a minority of American's have bachelors so, by default, a four year not-online bachelors degree is highly educated. However, I AM the asshole for saying that so ...
Anecedotally ... there's a trend of women doing an immediate masters in education / social something something right after undergrad, mostly as a way to continue to delay adulthood. They stack this again with a delay into adulthood by teaching and then, yes you are 100% right, plop into adulthood by getting married. I see it as a way to save professional / feminist face (I have a masters degree and was an educator!) while covertly pursuing a more traditional family arrangement that they may have wanted all along.
Regarding Government-As-Parent .... the antecedent for Teachers-As-Parents was welfare. It's tricky. I'm not a crypto-libertarian-social-darwinist that says let single mothers fend for themselves ... but the OVERWHELMING incentives to abandon the nuclear family have wreaked havoc on everyone, most especially the children of the lower middle class. Even the middle to-upper middle class essentially pay for surrogate or auxiliary parentage in the form of nannies, afterschool programs, and summer camps. This is because fighting for the limbo of a Dual Income Household necessitates both parents spend most of their time (and close to all of their energy) in competitive careers.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
Zoom out a little. The problem isn't with dudes not getting laid per se. It's a problem of managing unmarried young men. This is a problem societies everywhere in the world have always faced forever. In fact, human society has spent millenia designing and improving a roadmap specifically for how boys ought to navigate - military service, occupational development, expectations in (usually but not always) monogamous marriages.
Over the past 20 years (with antecedents out to 50) western societies have systematically destroyed all of these institutions for young men and offered no replacements. Say what you will about "traditional" male roles (and there are good reasons to want to change those notions) ... but an absence of roles and demonstrated paths to responsibility / status in society is absolutely catastrophic. This is for one simple reason; most of society's violence is perpetrated by young men. Murder, rape, assault, robbery ... 90% - 95% of all perpetrators are men between 18 and 35 (maybe extend that to 40, whatever).
"Incel" is just a part of the elephant that seems to be fun to grope recently (yes, I wrote that on purpose). The bigger issue is what to do with all these young men. But the climate is such that, right now, any political / social leader who stands up as says "Let's talk about the plight of young men" is ridiculed into oblivion.
Well, okay, we can continue to do that and continue to watch young dispossessed men murder random people on Twitch (literally that happened in the Buffalo shootings).
100ProofTollBooth
2mo ago
Agree with this. I have also never, ever seen a coherent definition of "rape culture" that didn't boil down to "young men gasp are interested in having sex with young women." There's this weird craze with the idea that in the inner sanctums of locker rooms and frat houses that otherwise median males are gathering together to trade strategy and tips on sexual assault. This is pants-on-head insane.
100ProofTollBooth
3mo ago
I'd say the difference is in perception and, unfortunately, what's termed "mood affiliation." Excuse the squishyness of my reply:
Lower class single motherhood is, now, seen as an inevitable reality and par for the course for a huge amount of young women. I wouldn't say it is "approved" of, but, accepted the same way physical injury on the job is assumed / accepted for working class men (every construction worker / roofer / tradesman who's been working longer than 10 years has a dozen scars from accidents, probably a bad knee or shoulder, and maybe some eye damage). Divorce perception is very similar; "Y'all tried, sometimes it doesn't work out. Gotta keep movin on."
Contrast with PMC divorce mood affiliation. It's usually a long, drawn out process (partially because there's more money involved and, therefore, more incentive to use the legal system to divide the pie) full of emotionalized soul searching ("how could it come to this?", "we were so in love"), followed by some semi-established period of Second Singledom (divorced dudes dating bimbo-ish ladies 20 years their junior, divorced women getting "glow ups" and having trysts with "interesting" men of almost any age. High likelihood of European or California temporary relocation), maybe followed by a second marriage (or just long term dating partner) that's really more about mutual companionship than family.
Throughout all of this, however, is the conception than the divorce wasn't a failure or an unfortunate reality of the times, but that it was simply a "stop along the way" to your truer, better, more You-er self. Going back to the idea of scars, how many pop songs and instagram poetry posts essentially say "our physical or emotional scars are what makes us beautiful!" Contrast this to the welder who can plainly state, "No, I really do wish that falling I-beam hadn't smashed off my two little toes. It hurt a lot, I couldn't work for some time, and I still don't quite walk right" or the Appalachian single mother, "It is fucking hard to feed and raise my kids without a man in the house. I do not have the time to "get an education" to try to increase my wage. My eldest keeps getting arrested but, because he's a 17 year old boy, there is no way I can physically intimidate or control him. Very few men will consider dating me because they do not want to help raise a family that isn't theirs - and I wouldn't want to do that in their position either."
Dealing with suffering and failure is part of any life. When it's your own damn fault, you ought to use it as a learning experience and an impetus to better choices and behavior. Other times, it is utterly random or, worse, cosmically unfair. That's when you exercise some sort of value/faith/anti-fragile/discipline system and decide whether or not (or how much) to descend into cynicism or existentialism or just undirected anger and frustration. Nobody's perfect or even very good at this, you just do as good as you can.
Far, far worse than any of those choices, however, is turning personal failure or even random chaotic unfairness into purely joyful and self-reverential deterministic positive affirmation. It's an insane (literally, not correctly functioning cognitive system) level of delusion that can only lead to repeated poor decision making and/or distorted risk appreciation, to say nothing of the personality and character defects it will likely nurture.
Before anyone jumps in with "but a conservative Christian world view doesn't prevent this." Yes! I agree. One of the things I detest the most about pop-culture mainline American Protestants are copes around hardship that are the same "purely joyful and self-reverential deterministic positive affirmation."[^1] You just lost your job and can't pay your bills, "The Lord is just testing me. But I know it's all part of the plan!" Maybe think why you lost the job? Were you bad at it and failing to perform? (Your fault). Has the economy taken a downturn and it wasn't your fault? That's cosmically unfair. What steps did you take to manage such a risk? Or, more forward looking, do you have a concrete plan to regain employment?
[^1]: Intra post self-quote. I am so.fucking.cool.
100ProofTollBooth
4mo ago
Riddle me this, Batman - doesn't "Wawa" sound suspiciously close to "Yaweh" ??? Think. About. It. All roads lead to the One True Hoagie Lord, and the rich and poor shall know him alike.
But seriously -
I like your Wawa honesty index quite a bit. To add some specificity, I think it's a good index for a very direct person-to-person level of honesty. Let me explain. If I'm a no-good-nik walking into a wawa to swipe an order from the ToGo rack that isn't mine, that's quite literally stealing someone else's - one, single person's - lunch or breakfast. It strikes at a deeply personal wrong that's been obvious since childhood. The trope for bullying is literally "stealing someone's lunch money." So, as far as directly personal honesty index goes, I think you've nailed it.
I think, however, it breaks down when you add some ambiguity and turn it from person-to-person to person-in-society. The great, recent example I have for this is from the San Francisco Streets mini-doc by Channel 5 News with Andrew Callaghan (successor to YouTube gonzo journalism channel "All Gas No Breaks"). He interviews a semi-organized stolen goods crew who enjoy haughtily recounting their felonious exploits. They run into high end retailers in the downtown shopping district of San Francisco, Union Square, and quickly snatch as much merchandise as possible. This is done with little to no stealth or concealment. The primary issue at hand is San Francisco's laws related to theft and larceny, but that's for another thread.
A key, but quick, line from one of these non-cat-burglars is "for most of these corporations, it's a write off anyway." Leave aside how valid that is on a legal level and leave aside the downstream impacts of increased insurance costs. That's beside the point. What counts is the revelation of the person-in-society mindset. "I'm not hurting a person, I'm causing a few corporate numbers on a spreadsheet to shift from one column to another...I'm not stealing FiveHourMarathon's sandwich, I'm effecting the same outcome as lost inventory in transit...this isn't a personal crime because I don't conceive of people being harmed or even involved in a direct and meaningful way." When you turn society into an abstract concept, you can abstract away very real and damaging actions. Let's not even get started on "selling some drugs just to pay rent."
(Back to the Hoagies...in a second.)
If everyone could rely on the mental model of person-to-person concepts of honesty, society would be safer, higher trust, All-Of-The-Good-Things. In fact, I'd argue that the primary "low brow" teaching of all of the Abrahamic religions pretty much amounts to "think of all of your actions as essentially person-to-person (or, really, person-to-God) and behave accordingly." Stealing isn't just wrong because a Holy Text says so and because you may be punished for it, it's wrong because it "hurts" God/Society/A stand in concept for another person even if it isn't an actual physical presence.
I don't think a totally secular society has a good replacement for this concept. The "best" I have seen is weak sloganeering - "don't be evil ... don't be a dick .... not cool!" It's underdeveloped and light on content and metaphysical heft. It's not specific enough to guide behavior and is used more as an after the fact admonishment. You do have over-thinking and secular-moralizing intellectual arguments about the moral fabric of society and social contracts but, again, I don't see their utility as behavioral guides. By the time I've digested Sam Harris' long winded treatment on the compound ethical implications of impersonal petty theft, I will have already digested FiveHourMarathon's Thanksgiving Hoagie with extra cranberry sauce.
Told you we would wind back up at Hoagies!
100ProofTollBooth
3mo ago
Tactical advice:
Don't bring this up with your partner. Insecurity kills relationships. If you don't talk about it, will it still manifest in other actions and behaviors? Maybe. But actively talking about it is certainly a powerful catalyst.
But forget the Tactical advice. When you start seeing relationships as a game with tactics you're missing the point. Sure, you can "win" them, but you're no longer in a relationship. This is what the Tate-style redpillers don't get.
My more earnest advice is to start the long, gradual, and difficult process of ceasing to look for personal validation from other people. That's an emotional addiction cycle you don't want to start. This does not mean falling into the grotesque postmodern mindset of demanding the world accept and celebrate you - warts and all. You need to continue to use the feedback from other people as a gauge on your own behavior or decision making. But not essential self-worth I know it may sound a little squishy and almost like a semantic quibble. The distinction is powerful. You have intrinsic value as a human, and you have control over your behavior and decisions. Use feedback from others to improve that behavior (according to your own well defined moral code) while maintaining a base level of self-validation based mostly on personal adherence to a virtuous moral code. This will take you through even the craziest extremes of poverty/wealth, sickness/health, social esteem / banishment. (Side note: I'm not recommending anything like the "Sigma Male" bullshit. Be a responsible and productive member of your community)
The old adage is that "women like a man with confidence." If you're constantly opening that core level self-validation in hopes the world will support it, you have zero self-developed confidence. If, on the other hand, you're an obstinate, arrogant asshole, you're failing to incorporate meaningful feedback from others and continue patterns of behavior that are anti-social, exploitative, etc. One of the best compliments I ever received was from a girl (ironically, that I wasn't sleeping with ...and never did);
"I can call you on your bullshit and you'll acknowledge it, but you won't immediately change up because I said something. You know who you are."
If you're worrying about your sexual performance in relation to past lovers, then you don't know who you are absolutely; you're seeking validation in a relative-identity way ("where do I rank on this list?"). You can get to the place of "I do sex real good" without reference to anyone else. If you truly do believe that, it'll show through in your behavior.
100ProofTollBooth
6mo ago
Fortune 500 CEOs aren't working bone crushing hours the way a small biz CEO might. (More on that second part later).
But, being an F500 CEO is incredibly hard.
I had the opportunity to meet and interact with one at the F500 I worked for in my mid 20s. This was a non-trivial interaction that occurred because a series of events led me to being on this big strategic thrust planning team that the CEO was half-personally overseeing. Another series of events led to a bunch of us being at the HQ on a Saturday. Right before lunch, the CEO walks into the main "war room" and literally rolls up his sleeves to help out. He was there all day. In that setting, everyone was talking with everyone at some point or another and the various "ranks" that usually created some deferential distance were not as palpable. It was easy to talk to the Big Guns, so I just sat down and started talking with the CEO.
The conversation can pretty much be summed up like this:
TollBooth: "So .... what do you actually do?"
F500 CEO: Chuckling, "I make about four decisions per year and, the rest of the time, am on call to answer questions that the board and wall street investors have. That's the easy part. I'm basically a financial psychotherapist. The first part is way harder."
TollBooth: "Why?"
F500 CEO: "Because those four decisions dictate the 16 - 20 decisions I can possibly make for the next 4 to 5 years. If I make the wrong ones this year, we, as a company, have fundamentally worse options in the out years."
TollBooth: "So, just make good decisions this year"
F500 CEO: "Well, yeah, that's the goal. But these 4 or so decisions I make rely on, without exception, massively incomplete information that I then have to use as part of a decision making model that incorporates what I think our competitors are going to do, what the market will support, and what won't cost us customers. All of those things are interdependent and you can't really say which one comes "first" in the decision making chain. It's like hitting a half dozen moving targets that are all moving in random directions - if you time it right, you can blast three of them at once, and that's a really great year. If you don't, you miss everything and it looks to outsiders like you were shooting randomly."
TollBooth: "Why are we doing this strategic thrust thingy right now?"
F500 CEO: "Because I screwed up one decision two years ago and I think I can salvage it with this. If I can't, I probably am gone 2 years from now."
I'd add one personal/emotional level consideration to this; you have to live with the uncertainty and lack of control leading up to and following making these four big decisions each year. One thing I learned in my first technical sales engineering team was that a sales process might be long, but you can sort of see it developing day to day and week to week. So, you can reduce your overall anxiety by just doing the next obvious thing in the process, even if that thing is banal (scheduling a follow up meeting, asking for a how-to guide review, whatever). A good analogy is training for a sports meet. You put in the work day in and day out, and then, all of a sudden, it's the big payoff day / week and you go out and get it (or don't). All your nervous energy along the way, however, you can divert into the training (or the development of a sales cycle in this case).
The CEO can't do that. There's no training cycle that builds up to something. It's literally four decisions made on four different days across a year. I think he could, and did, think about the decisions a lot before he made them. And I also think he probably had a team of smart people digging through a mountain of data and projections. But, like he said / I wrote above, these decisions had really incomplete information - you can't brute force your way through them even with a million spreadsheet runs. And, there isn't really a way to test and the iterate - you're calling out a new direction for the Battleship and you have to live with it until you hit the iceberg or don't. (Sorry for throwing in another unrelated metaphor)
I think the personality type that ends up as an F500 CEO definitely isn't "work like a dog 16 hours a day" but is, instead, "Be comfortable with weeks and months of utterly not knowing. Then pull the trigger." Is that hard work? You tell me.
Returning to small/medium CEOs working crazy hours. In my experience, that's 90% of the time a failure mode of a founder type CEO who can't give up micro levels of control and build the durable systems you need to scale. I've been in tech startups where the founder was very much the engineering genius type but then there came a time where the best answer was to "hire the MBAs." Everyone's life got better. Everyone made more money. The founder saw their big dream flourishing, albeit without direct control.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
76 Days sober.
Jan 1 - present.
I didn't have a rock bottom moment or full on dependency, but I was undoubtedly drinking far too much and for not good reasons. My estimate is somewhere just north of 1,000 drinks for 2023.
Expected: Energy, mood, discipline, mental health all far,far better. Everyone says this and it is true.
Unexpected: Quitting was easier than I thought. After day 10, I felt genuinely confident I could maintain sobriety. After day 20, I started to feel proud. After day 30, I actively started thinking about how much it would suck to relapse. After day 50 .... I just don't think about drinking anymore. I've been to dinners, bars, and hangouts with friends where everyone else was drinking and have had to turn down offers multiple times in one night. It just hasn't been hard. This was very unexpected.
There have been zero downsides. Social life hasn't suffered. A (minor) additional unexpected - the number of people who genuinely give you a "Good for you" style response and mean it. Some of these people, I think, may be struggling themselves.
100ProofTollBooth
2mo ago
And much like other technology-to-political thrusts, people will intentionally mistake technological capability with moral rectitude.
"We have an alternative to meet that's cheaper, more nutritious, and doesnt hurt the cows."
"Cool, I'm gonna eat this cow."
"Why wouldn't you want cheaper and better and no-harm-cow?"
"I just like what I like. It's tradition for me."
"JAIL!"
Exaggeration and hyperbole because I'm on an internet forum, but this is the blueprint of a Clear and Present Danger (great move, BTW).
To be clear, I'm a techno accelerationist who is incensed that we continually step on our own foot and prevent amazing human achievement for very vibes based reasoning (candidate 1: nuclear power) .... but I am a cultural traditionalist that believes that supporting tradition in culture - even when it falls out of vogue - is the only way to prevent the sky robots from reading our brainwaves. (I'm having fun today).
Here's an example you may not have thought of; e-mail addresses. E-mail addresses are now de facto on almost every legal document you will encounter. This was not the case well into the 2000s. Now, if you decide you do not want to use the "miracle" of Al Gore's internet, you are self-selecting out of a massive amount of economic opportunity in the western world. Nevermind a telephone number / cell phone.
It's fun for me to point and laugh at Vegans right now, but their moralistic hectoring and willingness to weaponized emotional propriety are the exact same strategy and tactics as the Transcult. They are coming not for my Big Macs, but my right to exist as a Big Mac enjoyer.
100ProofTollBooth
1yr ago
I agree with your final point about the evolution of human relations. People do own their own labor and time to a degree never before possible.
However, @FiveHourMarathon has a point I don't think you can totally dismiss as "relativistic nonsense." Take an example that hasn't fundamentally changed in at least 100 - 150 ears; the Military.
A 2nd Lieutenant is typically between 22 and 25. A Platoon Sergeant (typically somewhere between E-5 to E-7 depending on factors and how fucked up the enlistment cycle has been) is within just a few years of age of that 2nd LT .... probably late 20s.
On paper, the 2nd LT is utterly superior in everyway to the Platoon Sergeant. Short of physical violence, the 2nd LT has dictatorial control. In real life, the platoon sergeant has about a decade of experience (and, for this generaiton, a lot of that in combat if its a combat arms MOS). They know then ins and outs of the organization, the duty station, the personalities up and down the command. If the 2nd LT does not strike a balance of experience deference to the Plt Sergeant while not looking weak in front of the men, he's going to have a bad time. A lot of self-conscious but very gung ho 2nd LTs will totally blow off the subtle suggestions of Plt Sergeants ... and learn some hard lessons about leadership the hard way.
The point is, even in a situation where, yes, you have close to absolute superiority in every way over a "subordiante" (fun fact the etymological root of Sergeant is Servant) if you're going to have a long term or just a non-transactional relationship with that person, you have to invest in the relationship somehow.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I think this is a very valuable truth to highlight. Boomer's (and analyses of their life paths) tend to forget how easy it was to fuck around and NOT find out. I had an uncle who ended up in his 50s and 60s doing a very pleated khaki finance job who spent his 20s and 30s doing his best Jack Kerouac - bumming around the Western US, taking odd jobs to get from town to town, drinking, and drugging. He never had a rock bottom or come-to-Jesus moment, he literally just decided at about 35 "eh, better get on the straight and narrow" and more or less walked into a management job (insert something here about white male privilege if you like, but I think it's still a red herring). The point is a hop-on-hop-off respectable life was possible.
Now, you have kids who start out at 22 with $100k in worthless degree debt. You can't work at the grain elevator and scrape together a few hundred bucks to get closer to California when the service on your debt alone is $1,500 a month. The PMC has made hiring and firing such a bureaucratic nightmare that the interview-to-fully-onboarded process is benchmarked at 4 - 5 months. I think this is so that PMC HR types can then brag about themselves reducing it to three months when thirty years ago that timeline was probably three days.
All of this is to say that I don't think "The Path" is much different than it was. To @FarNearEverywhere's point, it's definitely more narrow because of PMC rent seeking and vampiric "I don't do the work but I help enable the work" grifting. More than that, however, we've setup these weird fundamental barriers to overcome that used to not exist. That's the real tragedy. It's important to remember that GDP and GDP per capita is still higher than its ever been (in a decade over decade sense, annual fluctuations notwithstanding) but the overall fluidity and flexibility of the system is greatly atrophied. There's a reason Andreesen-Horowitz (this is a mega VC firm that is the epitome of PMC not-actually-working-but-actuall-fucking-rich careerists) has a whole thrust for "American Dynamism." We've become the mass monster powerlifter who can still move a ton of weight, but takes 15 minutes to get out of the shower.
100ProofTollBooth
8mo ago
Halloween.
As a millennial, I have to say this is not because I'm some suburban goth with a weird Nightmare Before Christmas fetish (have never actually seen that movie). It's for two (groups of) reasons.
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Autumn, where I grew up, was just fucking phenomenally beautiful. Explosive oranges and reds across the forest. The crispness of the air - not chillingly cold and definitely beyond the sloth inducing slow humidity of summer. Finally, my High School had a weird location / situation where our football team was good and fun to watch, but without the generational fanaticism of Texas / Alabama / Georgia / whatever other Southeastern state often has that makes a game between literal children into something one step removed from Presidential Politics / Sunni-Shia schismatics.
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Chicks dig Halloween. I'm not referring to the cliche about "dressing up like sluts" or whatever was in (I think) Mean Girls. I mean the (far more effective) woo-woo witchy vibes that seem to work wonders for setting the mood. The harvest season, and themes of agricultural abundance have always had some strang association with fertility and sexual activity. The VVitch has this featured prominently. For some reason, even very modern and post-modern raised women seem to sense this. I'm not going to speculate on the psychology in a Friday Fun thread. All I know is that I first caught wind of that many years ago. I had a friend who was a horror movie connoisseur and introduced me to Dario Argento's original Suspiria. The "gore" is fairly tame for current standards, and it's mostly very moody / atmospheric film making. But part of that atmosphere is taking off your clothes, I guess. If there was ever a fantastic wingman in film form, it's Suspiria.
Liked this post. Two additions for consideration.
Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges. I just tried to find the report on this that I'm thinking of, but wow is Google really trash theses days. The report I'm thinking of mentions that a reason for this is that graduate education programs, even among the social sciences, has a particular resistance to, well, evidence. Think about it. If you're trying to compare the long term outcomes of a particular teach style, you have to track children over several years and then somehow control for cognitive ability, parental involvement, and personal preferences (Alice likes math naturally etc.) This is impossible almost from the jump. Therefore, a LOT, of the courses taught in graduate education courses are one step away from woo-woo bullshit. I had a family friend who, already quite liberal, shifted his graduate program to education technology (basically finding better ways to catalog and use online materials in public schools) because he was aghast and the low level of rigor in the teaching instruction courses.
It's worth looking at who teachers used to be and who they are know. Fun fact; there are more active duty Navy SEALs than there are male pre-K teachers in the US. The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted. This is now starting also to happen to women past 40. Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else. Pair this with administrator's inability to really do anything with disruptive students, and classroom order and discipline is DESTROYED. Then, it doesn't even matter what the instruction style is. Repeating words, guessing them based on context - none of it matters when have the class is filming a TikTok and the most the non-binary double masters grad at the front can do is loudly clear her throat.
This post got longer than initially intended, but you caught me mid caffeine stream. There is no viable path for public education in the US for the close to mid-term. COVID was the last nail in the coffin. Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.
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